For this type of man may be half-hearted and a coward in
little matters, but he never deceives himself. We have all our own
virtues and their defects. I am a well-equipped and confident person,
walking bluffly through the world, looking through and down upon my
neighbours, the incarnation of honesty; but I can find excuses for
myself when I desire them, I hug my personal esteem too close, and a
thousand to one I am too great a coward at heart to tell myself the
naked truth. You, on the other hand, are vacillating and ill at your
ease. You shrink from the hards of life which I steer happily through.
But you have no delusions with yourself, and the odds are that when the
time comes you may choose the "high that proved too high" and achieve
the impossibly heroic.
A tired man with an odd gleam in his eye came out of the shadows to the
firelight and called George by name.
"My God, Lewis, I am glad to see you! I thought you were lost. Food?"
and he displayed the resources of his larder.
Lewis hunted for the water-bottle and quenched his thirst. Then he ate
ravenously of the cold wild-fowl and oatcake which George had provided.
He was silent and incurious till he had satisfied his wants; then he
looked up to meet George's questions.
"Where on earth have you been? Andover said you started out to come
here last night. I did as you told me, you know, and when you didn't
come I roused the Khautmi people.
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