in
my prey.'

'Go your own way since you must. But I'm sorry that I was weak enough to
suggest the amusement.'

'"I am all discretion, and may be trusted to an in-fin-ite extent,"'
quoted Mrs. Hauksbee from The Fallen Angel; and the conversation ceased
with Mrs. Tarkass's last, long-drawn war-whoop.

Her bitterest enemies and she had many could hardly accuse Mrs. Hauksbee
of wasting her time. Otis Yeere was one of those wandering 'dumb'
characters, foredoomed through life to be nobody's property. Ten years
in Her Majesty's Bengal Civil Service, spent, for the most part, in
undesirable Districts, had given him little to be proud of, and nothing
to bring confidence. Old enough to have lost the first fine careless
rapture that showers on the immature 'Stunt imaginary Commissionerships
and Stars, and sends him into the collar with coltish earnestness and
abandon; too young to be yet able to look back upon the progress he had
made, and thank Providence that under the conditions of the day he had
come even so far, he stood upon the dead-centre of his career. And when
a man stands still he feels the slightest impulse from without. Fortune
had ruled that Otis Yeere should be, for the first part of his service,
one of the rank and file who are ground up in the wheels of the
Administration; losing heart and soul, and mind and strength, in the
process. Until steam replaces manual power in the working of the Empire,
there must always be this percentage must always be the men who are used
up, expended, in the mere mechanical routine. For these promotion is far
off and the mill-grind of every day very instant. The Secretariats know
them only by name; they are not the picked men of the Districts with
Divisions and Collectorates awaiting them. They are simply the rank and
file the food for fever sharing with the ryot and the plough-bullock the
honour of being the plinth on which the State rests. The older ones
have lost their aspirations; the younger are putting theirs aside with
a sigh. Both learn to endure patiently until the end of the day. Twelve
years in the rank and file, men say, will sap the hearts of the bravest
and dull the wits of the most keen.

Out of this life Otis Yeere had fled for a few months; drifting, in the
hope of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave was over
he would return to his swampy, sour-green, under-manned Bengal district;
to the native Assistant, the native Doctor, the native Magist