M. Philipon, therefore, as soon as he recovered consciousness, submitted to the domination of the Thought. It was, in fact, the wisest thing he could do, and he was rewarded presently by falling into an ecstasy or rapture which carried him out of himself for the space of ten days. This is a thing which happens to none but the most exalted souls. During this period he conversed not at all with any one. It was the last fortnight of the summer vacation when this strange thing befell him.

     
Claire first observed the strangeness of it at dinner. Her Father took the meal without a word, answering when he was addressed, but advancing no remark or proposition of any kind. After dinner he went into the garden and walked up and down the lawn. The boys came as usual and spoke to him, but he shook his head, and they joined Claire in her own room, wondering.

     
‘What is it, Claire?’ they asked.

     
‘I do not know. He says nothing; he is quite silent. I have never known him like this before.’

     
Then Allen plucked up courage and went out upon the lawn again.

     
‘Are you ill, sir?’ he asked.

     
M. Philipon stopped. ‘Not ill,’ he replied, lifting eyes which were troubled. ‘There is nothing the matter. Do not speak to me just yet.’ Then his Thought overpowered him again, and he spread out his hands with a gesture of impatience and resumed his solitary walk.

     
The three within spoke in whispers. Night fell, but he was still walking, and took no heed, as if it mattered not to him whether it was night or day. Claire played something, but it did not seem to rouse him. At ten the boys went away, but he did not return their good night. Then Claire came and took him by the hand, and led him into the house unresisting. Presently she gave him a candle and told him to go to bed; and in the middle of the night she woke up and heard him walking up and down his room.

     
This kind of conduct, repeated the next clay, and for several days afterwards, gave his daughter and his friends the greatest uneasiness. He was not ill; he took his breakfast and dinner exactly as usual, but he did not talk, nor did he read, nor did he work in the garden. He was not unhappy, because as he walked about he smiled or laughed, and waved his hands cheerfully, yet with mystery, because no one could interpret that gesture.

     
In fact, he was wholly absorbed and dominated by the Thought, which, as he now quite clearly perceived, was not only powerful beyond all belief, but also full of grace, and like a goddess for inexpressible beauty, and moreover a stupendous Thought. So stupendous did it seem to him, that it loomed before his wondering eyes as a Thought more wonderful than had ever before been vouchsafed unto men.

     
‘It is,’ he might have said, enumerating other great Thoughts for purposes of comparison, in this communion and silent meditation, in this rapture of his mind, ‘it is a greater Thought than that of Peter the Hermit, who yet did a considerable stroke of business with his; it is greater than that of Christopher Columbus, because he only doubled mankind, and therefore multiplied our troubles; it is greater than the Thought of him who proposed by means of steam to divide every kilomètre by a thousand; greater than the Thought of the man who, with an electric wire, abolished space altogether, so that people can go on quarrelling at opposite ends of the world; greater than the Thought of the man who proposed to send letters for a penny; greater even than that of him who discovered how to abolish pain and to let a man sleep while

surgeons saw off his leg — yea, to permit the martyr to dream of heaven while they toast him on a gridiron and perforate him with red-hot irons. Until I find words to express this Thought
I am dumb. I cannot speak of anything else, and of this I have
not yet learned to speak.’

     
In fact, M. Philipon was looking for words, and as yet no words came into his mind which were at all adequate to express the gravity of the crisis and the nature of the thing which was in his head. A Thought, however great, is nothing to the outer world unless it can be fitly and adequately expressed and presented in words so that everybody shall understand it. For instance, I know at this moment a man who has, quite unsuspected by his friends, in his head, and absolutely complete in all its parts, nothing less than a whole three-volume novel, and the best work of its kind ever yet presented to the world. He says so himself, and it is unlikely a man should be deceived in so important a point. He says, further, that the characters are absolutely original, the incidents new — fancy getting new incidents even from this kaleidoscopic world — the pathos inimitable, the wit and the humour quite unapproached. There is an immense, a universal, and a deathless reputation — he says, who ought to know best — in that novel. When once published it will be translated into every language; it will be the delight of Eskimo and Patagonian; it will civilise the Papuan, who wants civilising very badly; it will teach the Veddah how to laugh; it will, if anything can, convert the American Irish to ways of humanity, and will even soften the heart of the Nihilist. There only wants one thing — that this incomparable work shall be written down; and this, somehow, does not get done. It is always in his mind; he has arranged the situations;
he has grouped the characters, constructed his plot, prepared
the opening, and provided the dénouement But he does not write it. He refuses to communicate the nature of the story, of which he is as iealous as a traveller who has discovered a new lake; he waits, growing moody for the moment of inspiration which never comes. He is getting old now, and he may some day soon die with the novel unwritten; he may even die of that obscure and obstinate disease — novel on the brain.

     
Something of this kind oppressed M. Philipon. His Thought held him fast, and he could not find fitting words in which to express it. It was not until many days of wrestling — not till he had turned the Thought over and over in his mind, and looked at it from every point of view, that he found freedom of speech Had it been term-time, one trembles to think of uncorrected exercises and neglected rude translations.

     
‘He will come round some time,’ said Claire to the boys. ‘Do not seem to be minding him.’

     
It mattered very little whether they minded him or not, because he observed nothing.

     
It was in the evening, when the boys had gone, that deliverance came. Claire had gone as far as the garden gate with them; then she returned and laid her hand upon her father’s arm, saying nothing. It was a fair moonlight night; the air was heavy with the fragrance of jessamine and honeysuckle; a still and solemn air of full but late summer, after a still, hot day. Claire’s hand startled her father. He stopped, looked round him, sighed, and held up his forefinger, which meant ‘Attention!’

     
The girl sat down on the seat within the porch and listened. She was now nearly sixteen years of age, taller already than her father, a girl remarkable as yet for nothing but those deep blue eyes and that black hair. But one expects nothing remarkable from a girl at fifteen. unless she happens to be a maiden of Verona, where adventures have been known to arrive at a still earlier age.

     
She stood outside in the moonlight. He spoke gravely, even solemnly; and he spoke slowly — in his native tongue, of course.

     
‘My child,’ he said, ‘listen attentively to me. You are now nearly sixteen; you have the manner and air of a greater age; you are grown up; you are a woman.’

     
‘Yes, mon père.’ She was rather frightened at this solemn introduction to the unfolding.

     
‘I will treat you henceforth as a grown woman, You are also my daughter.’

     
‘Yes, mon père.’

     
‘I will treat you as a daughter who can be trusted.’

     
She stooped down and took his hand, and kissed it.

     
‘I have a great thing to tell you. I have the grandest — the most magnificent scheme to communicate. I demand your absolute — your profound secrecy. That is necessary. Without secrecy I shall fail; without your aid success will be difficult. Understand, Claire, what I ask of you will be difficult: it will require dissimulation; pretence; perhaps even we must do violence to Puritan ideas; we may have to invent.’

     
Claire began to tremble. Secrecy, grandeur, magnificence, with pretence! What could these mean but another revolution, with which she associated barricades and her father upon them?

     
‘At least,’ she said, ‘I hope I should never betray any secret intrusted to me.’

     
Her father suppressed an epigram about Eve and her daughters, and went on ——

     
‘You will not, Claire, I am sure. Yet I want more than a mere promise of secrecy. I want a tongue which will not add to suspicion: I want a clear eye, an open face, a frank smile; en effet, if you are a conspirator you must look as if there is no conspiracy.’

     
‘Oh!’ she cried; ‘do with me what you please; but if you

are killed, and — and — oh! what a pity to put up barricades in the Forest!’

     
He laughed. ‘Pretty innocent!’ he said, ‘be reassured, no one will be killed, there will be no fighting.’

     
‘If there is to be no fighting, and if no one is to be in any
danger ——’

     
‘No one, have no fear; you shall play your part with smiles on your face and joy in your heart, because the object of the conspiracy is one of your friends.’

     
‘One of the boys?’

     
‘Yes; you have already helped me well and faithfully; help me again, but this time follow my instructions in secret.’

     
‘Which of them?’ she asked eagerly, ‘which of them is it?’

     
‘It is Allen.’

     
‘But what has Allen to do with conspiracies and revolutions?’

     
‘Nothing — yet. But let us go within, I have much to say to you.’

     
She led the way into the house and lit the lamp. Then he began to unfold his plan, standing before the empty fireplace while Claire sat in her chair and listened. A well-bred French-man gesticulates but little, yet more than an Englishman, and he enforces his points with hands and fingers both. This was an important occasion and he gesticulated more freely than usual.

     
‘First, child,’ he said, ‘forget that I have a plan and let us consider the boy. Allen. Fix vour thoughts wholly upon Allen.

     
‘He is eighteen years of age; he has been for three years a clerk in the city of London. He goes there every morning at half-past eight, and returns every evening at half-past six. He is away, therefore, for ten hours. During this long time he sits upon a stool, he copies letters, he enters figures in a book, he adds up, he makes notes, he carries messages, he goes here, he goes there — what do I know? He is a servant. It hurts no man to be a servant for a time. The discipline of obedience is good. Yet it must be a service where he will rise to be a master. In Allen’s service he cannot rise unless by extraordinary chance, because he has no money. For him there is no future. he must always be a servant. It is already, for him, the life of a dog. In ten years it will be the life of a thousand dogs.’

     
‘But if it is bad for Allen, it is also bad for Will,’ said Claire, the impartial.

     
‘I told you to consider Allen, only. It is not, however, so bad for the other. Will must rise; he is a young man who designs his own future and will force events; for such as Will are the great prizes of a merchant’s career. I do not pity Will at present, I pity him only because in the end he will be so rich. It is the misfortune of the English people that they become so rich.’

     
‘Then, about Allen?’

     
‘He will become more and more miserable. In the city he has no future, he will neglect whatever chances offer; he will

see no opportunity; such men as he are blind to opportunity; if a hundred doors lie open to success he would see none of them, his thoughts will be elsewhere. Money is not in his mind, nor is success. I propose, therefore, first of all, to rescue the boy from the fate of the unsuccessful clerk.’

     
‘But if Allen has no other opening?’

     
‘Child, you have played all your life with the boy and you know not what he is, you know nothing about him. To be sure you are not yet of the age which looks below the surface. Know, then, that this boy is one of a kind not common. Nature makes but few like Allen Engledew; of those whom she does make, most are thrown away and lost for want of a guide and instructor. They waste their lives in regrets, in idle efforts; they succeed in nothing, because they do not try the one thing for which they were born; they never know the satisfaction of life which comes of doing what they were intended to do. That, my child, is the only happiness. How happy, for example, is the grocer whom Heaven intended for that trade! How enviable the lot of him born for a pork butchery, who actually becomes a pork butcher! But such as Allen, without a guide, stray into wrong paths and are lost. I have been already — I will continue to be that guide to Allen. By my help he shall be what nature intended him to be.’

     
‘But what is that?’ The girl’s curiosity was now roused. She was to be a conspirator: there was to be a revolution; but without those dreadful barricades with which her father’s early history was so deeply charged. What was to be the part destined to be played by Allen? Was he to be an Oliver Cromwell, a Robespierre, a Marat, or Lamartine, even? For none of these positions did Allen seem eminently fitted.

     
Her father went on explaining. He seemed to forget that he was talking to his daughter before setting forth his views so as to make them clear to himself.

     
‘Such a boy as Allen is, before all things, fond of books. This means two things — first, that he is curious about the world, eager to learn, and, secondly, that he is open to the influences of form and style. Words and phrases move him in the silent page as the common man is moved by the orator. He has been seized by the charm of language. You understand me not, my daughter; but listen still, When a boy has once learned to love words, when he feels how a thing said one way is delightful, and said another way is intolerable, that boy may become a mere rhetorician, pedant, and precisian; or an orator, one of those who move the world; or a poet, one of those born to be loved.’

     
‘And Allen, you think, will be — what? A rhetorician, or an orator, or a poet?’

     
‘It may be the first, but I think he will not be. For I also observe in the boy the intuitions, the fire, the impatience, and the emotion, which belong to the orator who speaks because he

must, and to the poet who writes because he cannot help it. I think — nay, I am sure — that a lad with these sympathies cannot be a mere rhetorician or a maker of phrases.’

     
Claire listened, trying still to connect this theory with the conspiracy, but she failed.

     
‘He reads, because it is his time for reading everything; he has no choice; it is his nature to read; he was born to read; he reads by instinct; he reads poetry, and his brain is filled with magnificent colours and splendid women; he reads romances, and he dreams of knights and stately dames; he reads history, and his heart burns within him; he reads biography, and he worships great heroes; he reads tragedy, and he straightway stalks about the forest another Talma; he reads idyls, and the meadows become peopled to him with shepherds and shepherdesses; he lives two lives. One of these is dull and mean; to think of it, while he is living the other, makes him angry and ashamed, for in the other he lives in an enchanted world where he is a magician and can conjure spirits.’

     
‘You know al l this, mon père? But how, unless Allen has told?’

     
‘Allen has told no one; but yet I know. Some day, my child, I will tell you how I know. Allen is already half a poet, he must be made a poet indeed.’

     
‘That will be delightful. Is this then your fine conspiracy?’

     
‘It is, my daughter, the first part only. Of the second we will speak later.’

     
‘But, if he is already half a poet ——’

     
‘At every step, my child, in the life of a man, there are two ways open, a right way and a wrong way. Allen must be guided into the right way.’

     
‘Oh, yes, mon père!’ she clapped her hands; ‘Allen shall be a great poet, and I will do what you please to tell me. This is a conspiracy that I shall like.’

     
It had been a long preamble, and she did not understand why there was so much mystery.

     
‘For your part, my child, Allen has arrived at the time when he must have a confidant and a companion. I have studied the symptoms, I am sure that he has already begun to try timidly whether he too cannot put thoughts into rhyme. I know the blush of his cheek, the flashing of the eye, the outward sign of the secret thought. Behold him! I can see him now’ — he stood as if actually watching the lad, with his forefinger lifted — ‘I see him alone in his room at night: the door is locked, the lamp is lit, the desk is open, the paper is before him, but he writes not; he hesitates, he is ashamed; at last with a blush, as a girl who confesses her love, he timidly sets something on the paper. Indeed, to write these lines is more difficult for him than for any girl to confess her love. Oh, holy modesty! Oh, blush of virginal youth! It is only from those

who feel the sacred awe for written words that great things can be expected. The written word remains; it must not be lightly spoken, it remains whether it is false or true, whether it is beautiful or it is ugly; whether it is sublime or whether it lifts up or drags down the heart. Let Allen always tremble when he translates thought into word.’

     
‘I do not understand, mon père. How do you know all this?’

     
‘Again, my child, I will tell you another day. You know now what Allen is and what he may be. First, he is to be a poet. You must help me — thus.

     
‘Allen must have some one in whom he can confide. Will possesses not the poetic temperament. The blood of Olinthus is pure beer. Therefore, Claire, my child, it is you who must be his friend.’

     
‘But he tells me nothing about his poetry.’

     
‘My daughter, a clever girl can make a young man tell her
everything.’

     
Claire blushed. It is not unpleasant to be told that one has such great power over other people. Of course she did not believe the statement; it is fortunately given to few girls to understand how great is their power over men. I do not think they will find it out until they have so altered themselves with political economy and platform oratory that they have destroyed this power and lost it all.

     
‘To begin with, Claire, you will lead him to talk of himself, of poetry, and will ask him why he, too, does not write verse.’

     
Had Claire been some other man’s daughter, Hector would have added to this simple injunction a few remarks on the wiles of coquetry, but he refrained.

     
‘When the boy has become a poet, then *mdash; the next stage — Ask not,’ he added in the deepest tones, ‘what this stage may be.’

     
‘I do not want to know,’ she replied; ‘it is enough for me that Allen is to be a great poet.’

     
Just then a thing happened which at the moment had a supernatural appearance. Beyond the cottage garden was the lane which led to the forest. As Claire spoke, there passed before the garden gate, slowly, with hanging head, no other than the figure of Allen Engledew himself. As he passed he raised his head and turned it as if to look at the house. The moon fell full upon his face and lit it with a strange, ghostly light. His large and lustrous eyes met Claire’s, but they did not seem to see her, and he passed along like a ghost, or like a dumb actor upon the stage.

     
It was nothing supernatural, it was only Allen himself in the flesh; he had been strolling alone in the forest, to dream away a summer evening beneath the moonlit branches.

     
‘Behold!’ said the man with the Thought, ‘we have seen our poet! His future is in our hands and he knows it not.’