o work,
he managed, to the universal surprise, to get a first. He went down, and
to the best of my belief was never seen in Oxford again.

I have heard vaguely that he was travelling over the world, and, when
I met in town now and then some of the fellows who had known him at the
'Varsity, weird rumours reached me. One told me that he was tramping
across America, earning his living as he went; another asserted that he
had been seen in a monastry in India; a third assured me that he had
married a ballet-girl in Milan; and someone else was positive that he
had taken to drink. One opinion, however, was common to all my
informants, and this was that he did something out of the common. It
was clear that he was not the man to settle down to the tame life of a
country gentleman which his position and fortune indicated. At last I met
him one day in Piccadilly, and we dined together at the Savoy. I hardly
recognized him, for he was become enormously stout, and his hair had
already grown thin. Though he could not have been more than twenty-five,
he looked considerably older. I tried to find out what he had been up to,
but, with the air of mystery he affects, he would go into no details. He
gave me to understand that he had sojourned in lands where the white man
had never been before, and had learnt esoteric secrets which overthrew
the foundations of modern science. It seemed to me that he had coarsened
in mind as well as in appearance. I do not know if it was due to my own
development since the old days at Oxford, and to my greater knowledge of
the world, but he did not seem to me so brilliant as I remembered. His
facile banter was rather stupid. In fact he bored me. The pose which had
seemed amusing in a lad fresh from Eton now was intolerable, and I was
glad to leave him. It was characteristic that, after asking me to dinner,
he left me in a lordly way to pay the bill.

Then I heard nothing of him till the other day, when our friend Miss Ley
asked me to meet at dinner the German explorer Burkhardt. I dare say you
remember that Burkhardt brought out a book a little while ago on his
adventures in Central Asia. I knew that Oliver Haddo was his companion in
that journey and had meant to read it on this account, but, having been
excessively busy, had omitted to do so. I took the opportunity to ask the
German about our common acquaintance, and we had a long talk. Burkhardt
had met him by chance at Mombasa in East Africa, where he was