the old
garden of his college, so carefully tended, so great with memories of
the past. And he thought of London. There was a subtle beauty in its
hurrying crowds, and there was beauty in the thronged traffic of its
river: the streets had that indefinable hue which is the colour of
London, and the sky had the gold and the purple of an Italian brocade.
Now in Piccadilly Circus, around the fountain sat the women who sold
flowers; and the gaiety of their baskets, rich with roses and daffodils
and tulips, yellow and red, mingled with the sombre tones of the houses,
the dingy gaudiness of 'buses and the sunny greyness of the sky.

At last his thoughts went back to the outward voyage. George Allerton
was with him then, and now he was alone. He had received no letter from
Lucy since he wrote to tell her that George was dead. He understood her
silence. But when he thought of George, his heart was bitter against
fate because that young life had been so pitifully wasted. He
remembered so well the eagerness with which he had sought to bind
George to him, his desire to gain the boy's affection; and he remembered
the dismay with which he learned that he was worthless. The frank smile,
the open countenance, the engaging eyes, meant nothing; the boy was
truthless, crooked of nature, weak. Alec remembered how, refusing to
acknowledge the faults that were so plain, he blamed the difficulty of
his own nature; and, when it was impossible to overlook them, his
earnest efforts to get the better of them. But the effect of Africa was
too strong. Alec had seen many men lose their heads under the influence
of that climate. The feeling of an authority that seemed so little
limited, over a race that was manifestly inferior, the subtle magic of
the hot sunshine, the vastness, the remoteness from civilisation, were
very apt to throw a man off his balance. The French had coined a name
for the distemper and called it _folie d'Afrique_. Men seemed to go mad
from a sense of power, to lose all the restraints which had kept them in
the way of righteousness. It needed a strong head or a strong morality
to avoid the danger, and George had neither. He succumbed. He lost all
sense of shame, and there was no power to hold him. And it was more
hopeless because nothing could keep him from drinking. When Macinnery
had been dismissed for breaking Alec's most stringent law, things,
notwithstanding George's promise of amendment, had only gone from bad to
worse. Ale