ia six months earlier, he would have
scouted as impossible the suggestion that he might bring a wife back
with him on his return: and his uncompromising avoidance of women, from
boyhood upward, had seemed to justify him in his assurance. But Nature
is inexorable. She has her own methods of accomplishing those things
that are necessary to a man's salvation; and behold in three months the
impossible had come to pass. The giant Mirabeau was right:--"_ce bete
de mot_" ought by now to be struck out of our dictionaries.

Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succumbed,--in spite of
himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,--he succumbed
heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly
exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way,
which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the
Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of
the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had
left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot
Calvinistic views. Their father--a man of an altogether different
stamp--had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know
more of them: but an Afghan knife had ended his career before he could
find leisure to complete their acquaintance. The history of
Anglo-India is one long chronicle of such minor tragedies.

Thus fire-eating Jock Lenox had exercised iron rule over his charges,
unhampered by parental interference: had reared them in an
unquestioning fear of God, and an unquestioning distrust of more than
half His creatures; had impressed upon them, in season and out of
season, that woman was the one fatal element in a man's life, the
author of nine-tenths of its tragedy, complexity, and crime.

Yet "one touch of Nature" had annulled, in three months, the work of
twenty years. So much for education!

For a while Lenox stood motionless where his wife had left him, as
though life itself were suspended until her return: for despite the
glory of autumn sunshine, of leaping flames upon the hearth, the room,
robbed of her presence, seemed colourless, dead.

Then, as the minutes passed and she did not reappear, restlessness took
possession of him; sure sign that he was very deeply moved. He crossed
to the open window, but even the colossal calm of the mountains failed
to quell the tumult of passion in his veins. Her last words left him