Borrowdean's smile was a little cynical. He was essentially of that order
of men who are dwellers in cities, and even the sting of the salt breeze
blowing across the marshes--marshes riven everywhere with long arms of
the sea--could bring no colour to his pale cheeks.

"Your little bird--a lark, I think you called it," he remarked, "may be a
very eloquent prophet for the whole kingdom of his species, but the song
of life for a bird and that for a man are surely different things!"

"Not so very different after all," Mannering answered, still watching the
bird. "The longer one lives, the more clearly one recognizes the absolute
universality of life."

Borrowdean shrugged his shoulders, with a little gesture of impatience.
He had left London at a moment when he could ill be spared, and had not
travelled to this out-of-the-way corner of the kingdom to exchange
purposeless platitudes with a man whose present attitude towards life at
any rate he heartily despised. He seated himself upon a half-broken rail,
and lit a cigarette.

"Mannering," he said, "I did not come here to simper cheap philosophies
with you like a couple of schoolgirls. I have a real live errand. I want
to speak to you of great things."

Mannering moved a little uneasily. He had a very shrewd idea as to the
nature of that errand.

"Of great things," he repeated slowly. "Are you in earnest, Borrowdean?"

"Why not?"