he can play," drily replied the other. "Let us judge
whether vanity breeds untruth in him."

The furtive brightening of the eyes in the women was represented in
the men by an assumed look of abstraction in most; in others by a bland
assumption of judicial calm. A few, however, frowned, and would have
opposed the suggestion, but that curiosity mastered them. These watched
with darkening interest the flute, in three pieces, drawn from an inner
pocket and put together swiftly.

David raised the instrument to his lips, blew one low note, and then
a little run of notes, all smooth and soft. Mellowness and a sober
sweetness were in the tone. He paused a moment after this, and seemed
questioning what to play. And as he stood, the flute in his hands, his
thoughts took flight to his Uncle Benn, whose kindly, shrewd face and
sharp brown eyes were as present to him, and more real, than those of
Luke Claridge, whom he saw every day. Of late when he had thought of
his uncle, however, alternate depression and lightness of spirit had
possessed him. Night after night he had troubled sleep, and he had
dreamed again and again that his uncle knocked at his door, or came and
stood beside his bed and spoke to him. He had wakened suddenly and said
"Yes" to a voice which seemed to call to him.

Always his dreams and imaginings settled round his Uncle Benn, until
he had found himself trying to speak to the little brown man across the
thousand leagues of land and sea. He had found, too, in the past that
when he seemed to be really speaking to his uncle, when it seemed
as though the distance between them had been annihilated, that soon
afterwards there came a letter from him. Yet there had not been more
than two or three a year. They had been, however, like books of many
pages, closely written, in Arabic, in a crabbed characteristic hand, and
full of the sorrow and grandeur and misery of the East. How many books
on the East David had read he would hardly have been able to say; but
something of the East had entered into him, something of the philosophy
of Mahomet and Buddha, and the beauty of Omar Khayyam had given a
touch of colour and intellect to the narrow faith in which he had been
schooled. He had found himself replying to a question asked of him in
Heddington, as to how he knew that there was a God, in the words of a
Muslim quoted by his uncle: "As I know by the tracks in the sand whether
a Man or Beast has passed there, so the heaven w