doubt about its fitness. Leo at
twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the youthful Apollo. I never
saw anybody to touch him in looks, or anybody so absolutely unconscious
of them. As for his mind, he was brilliant and keen-witted, but not a
scholar. He had not the dulness necessary for that result. We followed
out his father's instructions as regards his education strictly enough,
and on the whole the results, especially in the matters of Greek and
Arabic, were satisfactory. I learnt the latter language in order to help
to teach it to him, but after five years of it he knew it as well as I
did--almost as well as the professor who instructed us both. I always
was a great sportsman--it is my one passion--and every autumn we went
away somewhere shooting or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes
to Norway, once even to Russia. I am a good shot, but even in this he
learnt to excel me.

When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at my
own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree--a respectable degree,
but not a very high one. Then it was that I, for the first time, told
him something of his own story, and of the mystery that loomed ahead.
Of course he was very curious about it, and of course I explained to
him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present. After that, to
pass the time away, I suggested that he should get himself called to the
Bar; and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and only going up to London
to eat his dinners.

I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young woman
who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would insist on
falling in love with him. Hence arose difficulties which I need not
enter into here, though they were troublesome enough at the time. On the
whole, he behaved fairly well; I cannot say more than that.

And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth
birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history
really begins.

III

THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS

On the day preceding Leo's twenty-fifth birthday we both journeyed to
London, and extracted the mysterious chest from the bank where I had
deposited it twenty years before. It was, I remember, brought up by the
same clerk who had taken it down. He perfectly remembered having hidden
it away. Had he not done so, he said, he should have had difficulty in
finding it, it was so covered up with cobwebs.

In the evening we returned wi