ferent ways. Bellairs
went to her under the fixed impression that he was a cynic, and found
that he was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had long flattered
himself on being unimpressionable; and he was much inclined to think
that to be insensitive was to be strong with the best kind of strength.
He loved to lay stress on all that was devil-may-care in his character,
and to put aside all that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or
pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side of his mind
assiduously he could eliminate the other sides. In England, in London,
the process had seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him illusions
with both hands, and, against his will, he had to accept them. Protests
were unavailing, and soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the
horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps even a poet. Good
heavens! a Bellairs--a poet! His soldier ancestors seemed forming a
square and fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And yet--and
yet--

Instead of playing pool after dinner at night, Bellairs found himself
wandering, like Haroun Al Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo,
mixing with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking their
coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments, when he even wished to
wear their dress, to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing
blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging white turban. He resisted
this devil of an idea; but the fact that it had ever come to him
troubled him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard scepticism,
his contempt of outside, delicate influences, he went up the Nile--and
succumbed utterly to fantasy and to old romance. "I am no longer Jack
Bellairs," he told himself one day, as the steamer on which he travelled
neared Luxor on its way down the river from the First Cataract--"I am
somebody else; some one who is touched by a sunset, and responsive to a
gleam of rose on the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at night when
the pipes wail under the palm-trees, some one who feels that the great
river has life, and that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet
armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs! Go home to England--I stay
here."

And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the
Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and
emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his identity. He
was a bachelor, aged twenty-eight