and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel
of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them,
wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and
bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet, he had won
in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day
with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields
between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and
which had formed a convenient holder for his pens, when pens had been of
use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a
freshman at Oxford. The hoof of a favourite horse mounted in silver
made an ornament upon the mantelpiece. His trophies made the room a
gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at
last to his guns and rifles.

He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's
violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone. He sat with a
Remington across his knee and lived over again one long hot day in the
hills to the west of Berenice, during which he had stalked a lion across
stony, open country, and killed him at three hundred yards just before
sunset. Another talked to him, too, of his first ibex shot in the Khor
Baraka, and of antelope stalked in the mountains northward of Suakin.
There was a little Greener gun which he had used upon midwinter nights
in a boat upon this very creek of the Salcombe estuary. He had brought
down his first mallard with that, and he lifted it and slid his left
hand along the under side of the barrel and felt the butt settle
comfortably into the hollow of his shoulder. But his weapons began to
talk over loudly in his ears, even as Ethne's violin, in the earlier
days after Harry Feversham was gone and she was left alone, had spoken
with too penetrating a note to her. As he handled the locks, and was
aware that he could no longer see the sights, the sum of his losses was
presented to him in a very definite and incontestable way.

He put his guns away, and was seized suddenly with a desire to disregard
his blindness, to pretend that it was no hindrance and to pretend so
hard that it should prove not to be one. The desire grew and shook him
like a passion and carried him winged out of the countries of dim stars
straight to the East. The smell of the East and its noises and the
domes of its mosques, the hot sun, the rabble in its streets, and the
stee