The two men quickly caught up with the other people, and all went
forward
together along the road. The doctor had little to tell of his
experience,
for it had been a plain, hard life, uneventfully spent for
others,
and the story of the village was very simple. John Weightman's
adventures
and triumphs would have made a far richer, more imposing history,

full of contacts with the great events and personages of the
time.
But somehow or other he did not care to speak much about it,
walking on that wide heavenly moorland, under that tranquil,
sunless arch of blue, in that free air of perfect peace, where
the light
was diffused without a shadow, as if the spirit of life in all
things
were luminous.

There was only one person besides the doctor in that little
company whom
John Weightman had known before--an old bookkeeper who had spent
his life
over a desk, carefully keeping accounts--a rusty, dull little
man,
patient and narrow, whose wife had been in the insane asylum for
twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for
whose