as, I think, the weariest man
I ever happened on. 'So you want to leave the island?' said he when my
tale was out. 'Yes, yes, I believe you; I've learnt to believe anything
of those devils up yonder. But you must wait a fortnight, till the
relief-boat arrives from Jola'--"

Here the story-teller broke off as a rider upon a grey horse came at a
foot-pace round the slope of Burrator below us and passed on without
seeing. It was the Rajah, returning solitary from the hunt, and his
eyes were still fastened ahead of him.

"Ah, great man! England is a weary hole for the likes of you and me.
It's here they talk of the East, but we have loved it and hated it and
known it, and remember. Our eyes have seen--our eyes have seen."

He stood up, pulled himself together with a kind of shiver, and suddenly
shambled away across the slope, having said no good-bye, but leaving me
there at gaze.

VICTOR.

I.

"You will ruin his life," said one of the two women. As the phrase
escaped her she remembered, or seemed to remember, having met with it in
half a dozen novels. She had nerved herself for the interview which up
to this moment had been desperately real; but now she felt herself
losing grip. It had all happened before . . . somewhere; she was
reacting an old scene, going through a part; the four or five
second-hand words gave her this sensation. Then she reflected that the
other woman, too, had perhaps met them before in some cheap novelette,
and, being an uneducated person, would probably find them the more
impressive for that.

The other woman had in fact met them before, in the pages of _Bow
Bells_, and been impressed by them. But since then love had found her
ignorant and left her wise; wiser than in her humiliation she dared to
guess, and yet the wiser for being humiliated. She answered in a
curiously dispassionate voice: "I think, miss, his life is ruined
already; that is, if he sent you to say all this to me."

"He did not." Miss Bracy lifted the nose and chin which she inherited
from several highly distinguished Crusaders, and gave the denial sharply
and promptly, looking her ex-maid straight in the face. She had never--
to use her own words--stood any nonsense from Bassett.

But Bassett, formerly so docile (though, as it now turned out, so
deceitful); who had always known her place and never answered her
mistress but with respect; was to-day an unrecognisable Bassett--not in
the least impuden