ing, however bad they might be.

But Evelyn had turned his thoughts from sport to music, and gradually
he had become reconciled to the idea that his destiny was never to
see a hawk strike down a bird. But the occasion long looked for had
come at last, to-morrow morning the mystery of hawking would cease
to be a mystery for him any longer; and as he lay in his tent,
trying to get a few hours' sleep before dawn, he asked himself if
the realisation of his dream would profit him much, only the certain
knowledge that hawks stooped at their prey and returned to the lure;
another mystery would have been unravelled, and there were few left;
he doubted if there was another; all the sights and shows with which
life entices us were known to him, all but one, and the last would
go the way the others had gone. Or perhaps it were wiser to leave
the last mystery unravelled.

Wrapping himself closer in his blanket he sought sleep again,
striving to quiet his thoughts; but they would not be quieted. All
kinds of vain questions ran on, questions to which the wisest have
never been able to find answers: if it were good or ill-fortune to
have been called out of the great void into life, if the gift of
life were one worth accepting, and if it had come to him in an
acceptable form. That night in his tent it seemed clear that it would
be better to range for ever, from oasis to oasis with the bedouins,
who were on their way to meet him, than to return to civilisation.
Of civilisation it seemed to him that he had had enough, and he
wondered if it were as valuable as many people thought; he had found
more pleasure in speaking with his dragoman, learning Arabic from
him, than in talking to educated men from the universities and such
like. Riches dry up the soul and are an obstacle to the development
of self. If he had not inherited Riversdale and its many occupations
and duties, he would be to-day an instinctive human being instead of
a scrapbook of culture. For a rich man there is no escape from
amusements which do not amuse; Riversdale had robbed him of himself,
of manhood; what he understood by manhood was not brawn, but
instincts, the calm of instincts in contradiction to the agitation of
nerves. It would have been better to have known only the simple
life, the life of these Arabs! Now they were singing about the camp
fires. Queer were the intervals, impossible of notation, but the
rhythms might be gathered... a symphony, a defined scheme..