the curious party of three set sail for England in due
course.

"Hm!--He's every inch a Stukeley," remarked the General when Damocles
de Warrenne was ushered into his presence in the great library at
Monksmead. "Hope he's Stukeley by nature too. Sturdy young fella!
'Spose he's vetted sound in wind and limb?"

The Major replied that the boy was physically rather remarkably
strong, mentally very sound, and in character all that could be
desired. He then did his best to convey to the General an
understanding of the psychic condition that must be a cause of
watchfulness and anxiety on the part of those who guarded his
adolescence.

At dinner, over the General's wonderful Clos Vougeot, the Major again
returned to the subject and felt that his words of advice fell upon
somewhat indifferent and uncomprehending ears.

It was the General's boast that he had never feed a doctor in his
life, and his impression that a sound resort for any kind of invalid
is a lethal chamber....

The seven years since the Major had last seen her, seemed to have
dealt lightly with the sad-faced, pretty Miss Yvette, gentle, good,
and very kind. Over the boy she rhapsodized to her own content and his
embarrassment. Effusive endearments and embraces were new to Dam, and
he appeared extraordinarily ignorant of the art of kissing.

"Oh, how like his dear Father!" she would exclaim afresh every few
minutes, to the Major's slight annoyance and the General's plain
disgust.

"Every inch a Stukeley!" he would growl in reply.

But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly
for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition. Possibly
Fate's greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see
him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental
image.... The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of
her life's hero and beloved....

The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and
truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast
quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower
middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and
orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows
of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses,
a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles,
butlerless and _ghari_[9]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of
"natives," sepoys