consider them, but merely that being no concern
of his, it never occurred to him to do so. He walked his own route,
sometimes singing, sometimes dreaming, sometimes amusedly silent, and
always working. Work had been of necessity from the day his father's
death had summoned him hurriedly from college. A quixotic, and, it is to
be feared, culpable generosity on Richard Gray's part had left his son
penniless.

Antony had accepted the fact stoically, and even cheerfully. He had
looked straight at the generosity, denying the culpability, thereby
preserving what he valued infinitely more than lands or gold--his
father's memory, thus proving himself in very truth his son. He had no
ties to bind him; he was an only child, and his mother was long since
dead. He set out on his own route, a route which had led him far, and
finally had landed him, some five years previously, on the African veldt,
where he had become the owner of the small farm he now occupied.

After all, there had been compensations in the life. All unconsciously
he had taken for his watch-word the cry: "I will succeed in spite of
..." rather than the usual old lament: "I could succeed if...."
Naturally there had been difficulties. He had considered them
grave-eyed and silent; he had tackled them smiling and singing. Inwardly
he was the same Antony who had conquered the gorse-stick on the
moorland; outwardly--well, he didn't make the fight so obvious. That
was all the difference.

And now, sitting on the stoep with the silence of the African night
around him, he tried to shape his plans, to bring them forth from the
glamour of the marvellous which had enshrouded them, to marshal them up
into coherent everyday form. But the glamour refused to be dispelled.
Everything, the smallest and most prosaic detail, stood before him bathed
in its light. It was all so gorgeously unexpected, so--so stupendously
mysterious.

And through all the glamour, the unexpectedness, and the mystery, there
was sounding an ever-repeated chord of music, composed of the notes of
youth, happiness, memory, desire, and expectation. And, thus combined,
they struck the one word--England.

CHAPTER III

QUOD SCRIPTUM EST

The _Fort Salisbury_ was cutting her way through the translucent green
water. Cape Town, with Table Mountain and the Lion's Head beyond it, was
vanishing into the increasing distance.

Antony had taken his passage on the _Fort Salisbury_ for three reasons:
number