clearly marked. You shall see your fellow travellers drop off, but you shall, if you follow my clue, go on triumphantly, each milestone marking a new success. The world is before you to conquer. The world consists mainly of fools, but even fools get in your way, it is all they can do, and there are clever spirits to oppose your progress. The conquest is easy enough, but unhappily men usually find that out too late, when they are too old for the fray. I doubt whether you could do it alone, Geoffrey, at least while the victory is worth having, but with me behind you, you may be irresistible. Is it a compact?”

[18]

[19]

[20]

The compact was made readily enough, the chances of the strange proposal being too dazzling to be rejected. If the purely ethical side of the arrangement lodged a feeble protest in Herriard’s mind, the material advantage with which it was weighted drove the monitor out of hearing. Success deferred is to the impatience of youth more galling, perhaps, than the settled disappointment of failure to a maturer mind. From Herriard success, the immediate success which a fairly clever and ambitious man expects to be his, had been withheld to a degree that had begun to gall him. Other men of his standing, no cleverer but more pushing, or more lucky, than he, were forging ahead. We are never so conscious of our slow progress as when we see ourselves left behind by others who started with us. Here, ready to Herriard’s hand, was a means of catching up and passing his rivals, indeed of astonishing his world. It seemed rather like making a compact with the devil, he would tell himself with a laugh; yet where, he argued, was the wrong? He was going to rob no one; it was[21] merely a partnership that he was entering into, and the success of a partnership is gauged by its strongest rather than its weakest member. Why should a bed-ridden man of genius be debarred from the active exercise of his mental powers? Where was the dishonour in being his spokesman, any more than his amanuensis?

[21]

So the argument went all one way; the strange partnership began, and was not long in justifying its existence. Men who frequented the fruitful and thorny paths of the law began to speak of Geoffrey Herriard as one of the cleverest of rising counsel; some, speculating in “futures” out of the capital of their reputation for foresight, pointed at him as the coming man. He went far to justify them by the lucky capture of a seat at a bye-election, the victory being in some measure due to a series of 

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