wind from the jumbled cabin, he felt that to dress
beside Rutherford was an event not easily to be forgotten: but later on
as he paced the foam-spattered deck, and meditated on the facts of
existence so confidently revealed, he began to fear that the learned
Rutherford was merely a retailer of unwarranted legends. Still he had
propounded enough for Michael, when he returned to Carlington Road, to
theorize upon and impart to the Macalisters; and anyway, without
bothering about physiological problems, it was certainly splendid to
walk about the deck in the wind and rain, and no longer to hate, but
even to enjoy the motion of the boat. It was exhilarating to clamber
right up into the bows among coils of rope and to see how the boat
charged through the spuming water. Michael nearly made up his mind to be
a sailor instead of a Bengal Lancer, and looked enviously at the ship's
boy in his blue blouse. But presently he heard a savage voice, and one
of the sailors so much admired kicked the ship's boy down the companion
into the forecastle. Michael was horrified when, late in the grey and
stormy afternoon, he heard cries of pain from somewhere down below. He
ran to peer into the pit whence they came, and in the half-light he
could see a rope's-end clotted with blood. This sight dismayed him, and
he longed to ask Mr. Lodge or Mr. Vernon to interfere and save the poor
ship's boy, but a feeling of shame compelled silence and, though he was
sincerely shocked by the thought of the cruel scenes acted down there in
the heart of the ship, he could not keep back a certain exultation and
excitement similar to that which he had felt at Folkestone in the
girls' school last summer.

Soon the steamer with its cargo of vegetable ivory and tortured ship's
boy and brutal crew were all forgotten in the excitement of arriving at
St. Corentin, of driving miles into the country until they reached the
house where they were going to spend six weeks. It was an old house set
far back from the high road and reached by a long drive between
pollarded acacias. All round the house were great fig trees and pear
trees and plum trees. The garden was rank with unpruned gooseberry and
currant bushes, untidy with scrambling gourds and grape vines. It was a
garden utterly unlike any garden that Michael had ever known. There
seemed to be no flowers in this overwhelming vegetation which matted
everything. It was like the garden of the Sleeping Beauty's palace. The
c