of reason
inflicts on the animal--man. And for more than a year Mike thought he
had solved the problem of life; now he lived in peace--passion had
ebbed almost out of hearing, and in the plain satisfaction of his
instincts he found happiness.

With the wild chieftains, their lances at rest, watching from behind
a sandhill, he sometimes thought that the joy he experienced was akin
to that which he had known in Sussex, when his days were spent in
hunting and shooting; now, as then, he found relief by surrendering
himself to the hygienics of the air and earth. But his second return
to animal nature had been more violent and radical; and it pleased
him to think that he could desire nothing but the Arabs with whom he
lived, and whose friendship he had won. But _qui a bu boira_, and
below consciousness dead appetites were awakening, and would soon be
astir.

The tribe had wandered to an encampment in the vicinity of Morocco;
and one day a missionary and his wife came with a harmonium and
tracts. The scene was so evocative of the civilization from which
Mike had fled, that he at once was drawn by a power he could not
explain towards them. He told the woman that he had adopted Arab
life; explaining that the barbaric soul of some ancestor lived in
him, and that he was happy with these primitive people. He too was a
missionary, and had come to warn and to save them from Christianity
and all its corollaries--silk hats, piano playing, newspapers, and
patent medicines. The English woman argued with him plaintively; the
husband pressed a bundle of tracts upon him; and this very English
couple hoped he would come and see them when he returned to town.
Mike thanked them, insisting, however, that he would never leave his
beloved desert, or desert his friends. Next day, however, he forgot
to fall on his knees at noon, and outside the encampment stood
looking in the direction whither the missionaries had gone. A strange
sadness seemed to have fallen upon him; he cared no more for plans
for slave-trading in the interior, or plunder in the desert. The
scent of the white woman's skin and hair was in his nostrils; the
nostalgia of the pavement had found him, and he knew he must leave
the desert. One morning he was missed in the Sahara, and a fortnight
after he was seen in the Strand, rushing towards Lubini's.

"My dear fellow," he said, catching hold of a friend's arm, "I've
been living with the Arabs for the last two years. Fancy, not to