commonplaces, which Tom hurried over with fierce impatience.

"He wants you to come home; but my father has entreated him to let you
stay. You know, while we are here, he is safe; and my father begs
you not to come home, if you are succeeding as well as you have been
doing."

There was much more in the letter, which I need not repeat; and, after
all, a short postscript, by Mark himself, followed:--

"Stay where you are, boy, and keep up heart; while I have a pound,
your father shall have half of it; and you know Mark Armsworth."

He walked away slowly into the forest. He felt that the crisis of his
life was come; that he must turn his hand henceforth to quite new
work; and as he went he "took stock," as it were, of his own soul, to
see what point he had attained--what he could do.

Fifteen years of adventure had hardened into wrought metal a character
never very ductile. Tom was now, in his own way, an altogether
accomplished man of the world, who knew (at least in all companies and
places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to
do, to make, to seek, and to avoid. Shifty and thrifty as old Greek,
or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps
nothing he could not endure. He had watched human nature under every
disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the
savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate
thereof. He looked on it as his raw material, which he had to work up
into subsistence and comfort for himself. He did not wish to live on
men, but live by them he must; and for that purpose he must study