“Feel equal to taking the wheel? because if not——”
Sebastian laughed rather shamefacedly. “Oh, I’m not as bad as that. Would you mind starting her?” he climbed to his seat.
Stuart swung the crank. “Here, you’d better take my matches; I’m nearer home than you,” he tossed the box into the moving car.
“Thanks awfully. Good night!”
“Good night.”
As he listened to the dwindling hum of the engine, Stuart let his thoughts wander again to the matter of discipleship. He had marked how swiftly the boy’s sleepy content had been stung to passionate retort; he was responsive, then; and evidently not lacking in brains; altogether of the right stuff. Stuart reflected further that it would be a far more creditable job to drag a convert from a bed of roses than from a ditch of nettles.
And Sebastian, crashing homewards along silent unwinding roads, was conscious of a beating excitement, totally unlike his lulled lotus-dream of the past summer nights. Strange phrases had Heron spoken to him ... “I’ve only just succeeded in quenching my star.” “You will never know the best things of all—the gods thought them beyond you.”... Strange phrases—and no one to warn a lover on the danger of having his brain massaged.
CHAPTER II
FOLLOW-MY-LEADER!
All the next day, Sebastian Levi walked about with a throbbing head, and could not decide if he were suffering from the after-affects of ecstasy, wine, or metaphysics. Certainly his thoughts dwelt most persistently on the third of these, and this even while Letty’s petal-soft lips were quivering, half-shyly, in expectation of his eager kisses. Now he was swept by a flood of rage, recollecting Heron’s contempt of him; now he hated himself for his own Bacchic confidences; then again and yet again he revolved in his mind those few dropped sentences which hinted so arrestingly at a new way of thought—a new way of life. What did the fellow mean by his remark to the effect that he had quenched his star, which was too luminous? Did one then quench a star instead of following it? And why? Why? What result could possible ensue from such an act of madness?...