other. I think he was the most disagreeable fellow I ever knew.
They say he gave his wife a roughish time of it occasionally. Serve her
right, too."

"Why did it serve her right?"

Sir Eustace shrugged his shoulders.

"When a heartless girl jilts the fellow she is engaged to in order to
sell herself to an elderly beast, I think she deserves all she gets.
This one did not get half enough; indeed, she has made a good thing of
it--better than she expected."

His brother sat down again before he answered in a constrained voice,
"Don't you think you are rather hard on her, Eustace?"

"Hard on her? No, not a bit of it. Of all the worthless women that
I know, I think Madeline Croston is the most worthless. Look how she
treated you."

"Eustace," broke in his brother almost sharply, "if you don't mind, I
wish you would not talk of her like that to me. I can't--in short, I
don't like it."

Sir Eustace's eyeglass dropped out of Sir Eustace's eye--he had
opened it so wide to stare at his brother. "Why, my dear fellow," he
ejaculated, "you don't mean to tell me you still care for that woman?"

His brother twisted his great form about uncomfortably in the low chair
as he answered, "I don't know, I'm sure, about caring for her, but I
don't like to hear you say such things about her."

Sir Eustace whistled softly. "I am sorry if I offended you, old fellow,"
he said. "I had no idea that it was still a sore point with you. You
must be a faithful people in South Africa. Here the 'holy feelings of
the heart' are shorter lived. We wear out several generations of them in
twelve years."

III

Bottles did not go to bed till late that night. Long after Sir Eustace
--who, always careful of his health, never stopped up late if he could
avoid it--had vanished, yawning, his brother sat smoking pipe after pipe
and thinking. He had sat many times in the same way on a wagon-box in
the African veld, or up where the moonlight turned the falls of the
Zambesi into a rushing cataract of silver, or alone in his tent when all
the camp was sleeping round him. It was a habit of this queer, silent
man to sit and think for hours at night, and arose to a great
extent from an incapacity to sleep, that was the weak point in his
constitution.

As for his meditations, they were various, but mostly the outcome of a
curious speculative side to his nature, which he never revealed to the
outside world. Dreams of a happiness of which heretofore his ha