subject, not without lasting
effect. For one winter he had passed at The Hard, in the fine bodily
health and vigour of his early thirties, this very lack of women's
society contributed, by not unnatural reaction, to force the idea of
woman hauntingly upon him--thereby making possible a strange and hidden
love passage off the Dead Sea fruit of which he was in process of
supping here to-night.

He moved, bent forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms,
closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his
raised hands. For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful
southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama
re-lived and reenacted itself!

It dated far back, to a period when his career was still undetermined,
hedged about by doubts and uncertainties--before the magnificent and
terrible years of the Mutiny brought him, not only fame and distinction,
but a power of self-expression and of plain seeing.--Before, too, his not
conspicuously happy marriage. Before the Bhutpur appointment tested and
confirmed his reputation as a most able if most autocratic ruler. Before,
finally, his term of service under the Ameer in Afghanistan--that
extraordinary experience of alternate good and evil fortune in barbaric
internecine warfare, the methods and sentiments of which represented a
swing back of three or four centuries, Christianity, and the attitude of
mind and conduct Christianity inculcates, no longer an even nominal
factor, Mahomet, sword in hand, ruthlessly outriding Christ.

He had done largely more than the average Englishman, of his age and
station, towards the making of contemporary history. Yet it occurred to
him now, sitting at Damaris' bedside, those intervening years of
strenuous public activity, of soldiering and of administration, along
with the honours reaped in them, had procured cynically less substantial
result, cynically less ostensible remainder, than the brief and hidden
intrigue which preceded them. They sank away as water spilt on sand--thus
in his present pain he pictured it--leaving barely a trace. While that
fugitive and unlawful indulgence of the flesh not only begot flesh, but
spirit,--a living soul, henceforth and eternally to be numbered among the
imperishable generations of the tragic and marvellous children of men.

Then, aware something stirred close to him, Charles Verity looked up
sharply, turning his head; to find Damaris--raised on one elbow pla