The younger man's enthusiasm drew an approving smile from his father. Also a world of pride in this great, fair-haired idealist shone in his eyes.
"Sweep and garnish. That's it, boy," he said ardently. "And what a sweeping, what a garnishing is needed. I wonder. Can it be done?"
"That is what we intend to test. It is to that great effort my colleagues have pledged their lives. I have pledged mine to another. I tell you, Dad, that the sweeping and garnishing isn't sufficient. That is only the moral side of the campaign that lies before us, and without it the other side can never be achieved. But all my future is to be given up to the material security side of the problem. It may be only my dreaming, but I seem to see a terrible threat sweeping up over the eastern horizon. A threat so appalling for us as to make the late war almost insignificant. Some day, if you have the patience to listen to a dreamer, I will tell you of the dread that persistently haunts me. Meanwhile we have that—breathing space."
Without troubling himself to get a hat Ruxton Farlow passed through the entrance hall, out into the brilliant, warm summer night, and strode on towards his destiny.
CHAPTER II
A STRANGE MEETING
The peace of the night knocked vainly at the heart of the man as he moved along over the grass-grown cart track, which skirted those fields abutting on the pathway marking the broken line of the lofty Yorkshire cliffs.
The warmth of the July air left him utterly forgetful of the light evening clothes in which he was clad, just as the grass-grown track failed to remind him that the shoes he wore had never been intended for country rambles. The soft sea breeze fanned his cheeks, and the bracing air added vigor of body if it left his mental feelings wholly uninspired.
For the time, at least, Ruxton Farlow was living within himself. His mental digestion was devouring hungrily of that force which had come to make his contemporaries realize that here was a man of that unusual calibre which must ultimately make him a leader of men in whatever walk of life he chose for that strenuous journey.