y in all big essentials. Little worries, little disturbances,
disappointments, were inevitable for a man whose heart was so
thoroughly in his work, and for whom the conditions of work were often
so trying. But these had only ruffled the surface; underneath the
smooth river flowed along strong and self-contained. After the
upheaval that had been as a volcanic eruption upon smiling
sunshine-flooded fields in his life, and the black desolation that
followed, there had succeeded a long quiet period of calm action that,
if it held nothing which could be termed joy, held nothing either that
was sorrow except his buried memories. And he had been well content
that it should be so; well content to contemplate just that and
nothing else to the journey's end.

And now, suddenly, had come this vague unrest. He sought for its
source and its reason, and could not find a satisfactory answer. For
though it dated from the coming of the millionaire and his party, he
would not admit himself capable of the folly of falling in love with
Meryl. To him it was such inexcusable foolishness, in view of many
things. Rather he chose to believe it was a voice from the old life,
reawakened in his heart, and calling to him across the years. When he
smoked his pipe outside the huts, and pondered deeply some knotty
point in his report and in the work of the Native Commission, he found
himself suddenly remembering that it was September. And away in his
beloved Devon they would be out after the partridges--striding
through the heather and across the stubble-fields, ranging over the
purple moors with purple horizons all round, and in the distance a
strip of turquoise, which was the sea. He could almost hear the whir
... rr of wings and the shots on some far hill-side. And he knew that,
though the shooting in a wild, vast country like Rhodesia is a far
finer and more sportsmanlike affair than shooting driven birds in
England, he yet felt, and would ever feel, that intense British love
of the soil that had reared him, and the moors where he fired his
first gun and shot his first bird. And, of course, upon the heels of
the shooting came the hunting, which had once been the joy of his
life, ever after he first put his pony at a stiff fence, entirely on
his own, and sailed gloriously over, in spite of an anxious groom
shouting caution to the winds.

And then all the woodcraft and fieldcraft he had learnt from his
uncle's keepers and his uncle's farmer tenant