e idleness a fine art,' he laughed. 'People,
now-a-days, turn up their noses at the dilettante. Well, I mean to be a
dilettante. I want to devote myself to the graces of life. I'm forty,
and for all I know I haven't so very many years before me: in the time
that remains, I want to become acquainted with the world and all the
graceful, charming things it contains.'

Alec, fallen into deep thought, stared into the fire. Presently he took
a long breath, rose from his chair, and drew himself to his full height.

'I suppose it's a life like another, and there is no one to say which is
better and which is worse. But, for my part, I would rather go on till I
dropped. There are ten thousand things I want to do. If I had ten lives
I couldn't get through a tithe of what, to my mind, so urgently needs
doing.'

'And what do you suppose will be the end of it?' asked Dick.

'For me?'

Dick nodded, but did not otherwise reply. Alec smiled faintly.

'Well, I suppose the end of it will be death in some swamp, obscurely,
worn out with disease and exposure; and my bearers will make off with my
guns and my stores, and the jackals will do the rest.'

'I think it's horrible,' said Mrs. Crowley, with a shudder.

'I'm a fatalist. I've lived too long among people with whom it is the
deepest rooted article of their faith, to be anything else. When my time
comes, I cannot escape it.' He smiled whimsically. 'But I believe in
quinine, too, and I think that the daily use of that admirable drug will
make the thread harder to cut.'

To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who
threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage
intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the
man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful
in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.

'And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred
years,' said Dick. 'We shall both be forgotten long before then, you
with your strenuousness, and I with my folly.'

'And what conclusion do you draw from that?' asked Mrs. Crowley.

'Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda.'

IV

These was some rough shooting on the estate which Mrs. Crowley had
rented, and next day Dick went out to see what he could find. Alec
refused to accompany him.

'I think shooting in England bores me a little,' he said. 'I have a