f life had suddenly
erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for
return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening
plans and its obliterating and absolving years of honest labor.

He would never forget that moment, no matter into what ways or moods
life might lead him. The rhythmic pound and beat of a company of
British infantry, swarthy and strange-looking in their neutral-tinted
khaki, marched briskly by on the hard stone road, momentarily filling
the garden quietnesses with a tumult of noise. A bugle had sounded
from one of the fortified galleries high above him, had sounded clearly
out across the huddled little town at the foot of the Rock,
challenging, uncompromising, thrillingly penetrating, as the paper had
fluttered and shaken in his fingers. He had accepted it, in that first
moment of unreasoning emotionalism, as an auspicious omen, as the call
of his own higher life across the engulfing abysses of the past. He
had forgotten, for the time being, just where and what he was.

But that grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after
he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to
him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish
tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past
Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in
final and frenzied search of the American Consul.

He had found the Consulate, at last, on what seemed a back street of
the Spanish quarter, a gloomy and shabby room or two, with the faded
American flags over the doorway clutched in the carven claws of a still
more faded eagle. And he had waited for two patient hours, enduring
the suspicious scowls of a lean and hawk-like Spanish housekeeper, to
discover, at the end, that the American Consul had been riding at
hounds, with the garrison Hunt Club. And when the Consul, having duly
chased a stunted little Spanish fox all the way from Legnia to
Algeciras, returned to his official quarters, in English
riding-breeches and irradiating good spirits, Durkin had seen his
new-blown hopes wither in the blossom. The Consul greatly regretted
that his visitor had been kept waiting, but infinitely greater was his
regret that an official position like his own gave him such limited
opportunity for forwarding impatient electrical inventors to their
native shores. No doubt the case was imminent; he was glad his visitor
felt