ging syndicate. "Have him by all means, Edith, if you think it
will annoy those people. Besides, a Grierson who was interesting would
be quite a show animal."

CHAPTER II

Jimmy Grierson landed in England a broken man. What was almost worse, he
was aware of the fact, and, whilst he resented the way in which Fate had
dealt with him, he had no great hopes of altering things. He had drifted
so long that, somehow, he supposed he must go on drifting. John Locke
had stopped the process for a time, and given him something to stick to,
something worth doing; but a bullet from an old Remington in the hands
of a ragged Dago, a bullet probably aimed at someone else, had sent him
adrift again. True, that same Dago had gone, a few seconds later, to
whatever place there is reserved for his kind; but that did not alter
matters; it avenged, perhaps, but it could not bring back, the one man
besides his father for whom Jimmy had ever cared, who had ever
understood him, and, therefore, been able to keep him from drifting.

His decision to return to England had been taken on the spur of the
moment, without reflection; but he held to it, because no other course
seemed to offer any better prospects. He knew, perfectly well, that
Locke's partner would not want to keep him on, and he shrank from the
ordeal of searching for employment again. He had been through it so
often before; and he had learnt, long since, that the man on the spot
only gets the temporary billets; the permanent staff is always recruited
at home. Moreover, he had the fevers of half a dozen different countries
in his system, and the shock of Locke's death brought at least one of
them to the surface. Two Dagos helped him on board ship, a wreck, and
though, physically, he was much stronger at the end of the voyage, his
nerves were far from being right.

London extended its welcome to him in the form of a drenching rain, and
he shivered a little under the thin, ready-made overcoat he had bought
from a German store on the Coast.

He had hoped that one of the family would have met the boat train, and
carried him off to a real home; but, though there had been a welcoming
hand for most of his fellow passengers, he, himself, scanned the crowd
in vain for a familiar face. Even those who had come across the ocean
with him seemed to forget him the moment they got out on to the
platform. He became the stranger at once; so he stood to one side until
they had all departed, fee