ying,--"the time Wiston and I
were sent--" and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded. Wiston's
name cast a shadow over our reminiscences.

"What did he actually do?" I asked after a short silence.

"Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular,
fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps. And then suddenly he
did something so extremely blackguardly that everything was at an end.
It's no good repeating details, and I hate to think about it. We know
little about our neighbours, and I'm not so sure that we know much
about ourselves. There may be appalling depths of iniquity in every
one of us, only most people are fortunate enough to go through the
world without meeting anything to wake the devil in them. I don't
believe Wiston was bad in the ordinary sense. Only there was something
else in him-somebody else, if you like--and in a moment it came
uppermost, and he was a branded man. Ugh! it's a gruesome thought."
Thirlstone had let his pipe go out, and was staring moodily into the
fire.

"How do you explain things like that?" he asked. "I have an idea of my
own about them. We talk glibly of ourselves and our personality and
our conscience, as if every man's nature were a smooth, round, white
thing, like a chuckie-stone. But I believe there are two men-perhaps
more-in every one of us. There's our ordinary self, generally rather
humdrum; and then there's a bit of something else, good, bad, but never
indifferent,--and it is that something else which may make a man a
saint or a great villain."

"'The Kings of Orion have come to earth,'" I quoted.

Something in the words struck Thirlstone, and he asked me what was the
yarn I spoke of.

"It's an old legend," I explained. "When the kings were driven out of
Orion, they were sent to this planet and given each his habitation in
some mortal soul. There were differences of character in that royal
family, and so the alter ego which dwells alongside of us may be
virtuous or very much the reverse. But the point is that he is always
greater than ourselves, for he has been a king. It's a foolish story,
but very widely believed. There is something of the sort in Celtic
folk-lore, and there's a reference to it in Ausonius. Also the bandits
in the Bakhtiari have a version of it in a very excellent ballad."

"Kings of Orion," said Thirlstone musingly. "I like that idea. Good
or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belie