E Phillips Oppenheim

Master of Men E Phillips Oppenheim

UPWARD in long sinuous bends the road wound its way into the heart of the hills. Theman, steadily climbing to the summit, changed hands upon the bicycle he was pushing, andwiped the sweat from his grimy forehead. It had been a gray morning when he had left, with no promise of this burst of streaming sunshine. Yet the steep hill troubled him butlittle-he stepped blithely forward with little sign of fatigue. His workman's clothes, open at the throat, showed him the possessor of a magnificentpair of shoulders; the suggestion of great physical strength was carried out also in his hard, clean-cut features and deep-set, piercing gray eyes. He passed a grove where the groundwas blue with budding hyacinths, and he loitered for a moment, leaning upon the saddle ofhis bicycle, and gazing up the sunlit glade. A line or two of Keats sprang to his lips. As heuttered them a transfiguring change swept across his face, still black in patches, as thoughfrom grimy labor. His hard, straight mouth relaxed into a very pleasant curve, a softer lightflashed in his steely eyes. He reached a wooden gate at last on his right-hand side, and, pushing it open, skirted astone wall until he came to a sudden dip in the field, and with its back against a rockyeminence, a tiny cottage built of the stones which lay in heaps about the turf. He leaned hisbicycle against the wall, and, taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the doo