. I've begun," had been the small boy's retort. And he had
returned to the onslaught, regardless of the watching man.

Ten minutes had ended in an exceedingly heated triumph. The boy had sunk
upon the grass, sucking a wounded finger. The mood of determination had
passed with the victory. He had been too shy to look at the rider on the
black horse. But the gorse stick had lain on the ground beside him.

"Shake hands," the man had said.

And the boy had scrambled to his feet to extend a grubby paw.

"What's your name?" the man had demanded.

"Antony Gray."

"Not Richard Gray's son?"

"Yes."

The man had burst into a shout of laughter.

"Where is your father?"

"In London."

"Well, tell him his son is a chip of the old block, and Nicholas Danver
says so. Ask him if he remembers the coach road from Byestry to
Kingsleigh. Good-bye, youngster."

And Nicholas had ridden away.

It was astonishing in what detail the scene came back to him. He could
smell the hot aromatic scent of the gorse and wild thyme. He could hear
the humming of the bees above the heather. He could see the figure on the
black horse growing speck-like in the distance as he had gazed after it.

The whole thing pieced itself together. He remembered that he had gone to
that cottage on the moorland with his nurse to recover after measles. He
remembered that his father had said that the air of the place would make
a new boy of him. He remembered his father's laugh, when, later, the tale
of the meeting had been recounted to him.

"Good old Nick," he had said. "One loses sight of the friends of one's
boyhood as one grows older, more's the pity. I must write to old Nick."

There the incident had closed. Yet clearly as the day on which it had
occurred, a day now twenty-five years old, it repainted itself on
Antony's brain, as he sat on the stoep, gazing out into the African
night.

It never occurred to him to wonder why Nicholas should have left him his
money and property. That he had done so was marvellous, truly; his
reasons for doing so were not even speculated upon. Antony had a
childlike faculty for accepting facts as they presented themselves to
him, with wonderment, pleasure, frank disapprobation, or stoicism, as the
case might be. The side issues, which led to the presentation of the
facts, were, generally speaking, the affair of others rather than his
own; and, as such, were no concern of his. It was not that he
deliberately refused to