Malabar Hill. Their hired carriage
came in behind his trim little brougham, as it turned on the driveway
into his compound.

"My fortune again!" the Doctor called. "I've been detained by a case and
properly sweating for fear you'd reach my den first."

Tea was served on a verandah entirely foreign and tropical and strange
looking to Skag. A field of palm-tops stretched away from their feet to
the sea. They told him the city of Bombay was hidden under those fronds.

"And now you understand, Cadman," the Doctor was saying, "there's your
own room and one next for your friend Hantee. Your traps will be up
before you sleep, which may not be early, for I've a tamasha on for you
this night--you remember, I enjoy dinner in the morning?"

That tamasha was a maze of strange colour, strange motion and stranger
perfume to Skag; not penetrating his conscious nature at all--feeling
unreal to him.

"I've been watching you without shame this night, young man," the Doctor
said to him, as they finished the after-midnight meal. "My entertainment
fell dead with you. Sir. You've been 'way off somewhere else. I'm
simply consumed to know what you have found in life, to make your eyes
blind and your ears deaf to the lure of human beauty. You're not to be
distressed by my impudence--it's innocent."

"If I may answer for my friend, I belive [Transcriber's note: believe?] I
can tell you, Doctor." Cadman saw consent in Skag's eye and went on: "He
has found the lure of creatures. He has entered into the spell of a
young tigress playing with her kittens, in her own place. He has watched
another tigress fight her mate to a finish, defending her little ones
from their sire. He has listened to the symphonies of night and seen the
drama of the wild. He lives in the clean glamour of the primeval jungle."

The Doctor's eyes widened for seconds; then they gloomed as he spoke:

"Between you, you challenge modern manhood. We have not conceived that
'clean glamour' since men were young--forgotten ages past. No, there was
no human beauty to-night to make a man forget those tigresses. . . . She
was not there. I am one of many who miss her, but I would give--" The
Doctor broke off, searching their faces before he spoke again: "There is
no hope you will know the depth of the calamity; the bitterness of the
loss. Speaking of clean things--"

"Who was she?" Cadman asked.

"She was the most beautiful thing on earth. She was indeed the