g from a branch
above it, and walked easily towards it. The square opened to receive him
and closed up again.

On the march back two of the Englishmen sickened of ague and died. Six
months later a third was killed in a punitive expedition. The fourth was
drowned off Walfisch Bay before another year had elapsed.

CHAPTER I

Hugh Fielding, while speculating upon certain obscure episodes in the
history of a life otherwise familiar to an applauding public, and at a
loss to understand them, caught eagerly at a simile. Now Fielding came
second to none in his scorn for the simile as an explanation, possibly
because he was so well acquainted with its convenience. 'A fairy lamp' he
would describe it, quite conscious of the irony in his method of
description, 'effective as an ornament upon a table-cloth, but a poor
light to eat your dinner by.'

Nevertheless Fielding hugged this particular simile, applying it as a
sort of skeleton key to the problem of Stephen Drake's career.

He compared Drake's career, or at all events that portion of it which was
closed, to the writing of a book. So many years represent the
accumulation of material, a deliberate accumulation; at a certain date
the book is begun with a settled design, _finis_ being clearly foreseen
from the first word of the preface. But once fairly started the book
throws the writer on one side and takes the lead, drags him, panting and
protesting, after it, flings him down by-ways out of sight of his main
road, tumbles him into people he had no thought of meeting, and finally
stops him dead, Heaven knows where--in front of a blank wall, most
likely, at the end of a _cul de sac_. He may sit down then and cry if he
likes, but to that point he has come in spite of his intentions.

The actual settling down to the work, with the material duly ticketed at
his elbow, in Drake's case Hugh Fielding dated back to a certain day
towards the close of October.

Upon that afternoon the _Dunrobin Castle_ from Cape Town steamed into
Plymouth Harbour, and amongst the passengers one man stepped from the
tender on to the quay and stood there absolutely alone. No one had gone
out to the ship to meet him; no one came forward now on the quay-side,
and it was evident from his indifference to the bystanders that he
expected no one. The more careless of these would have accounted him a
complete stranger to the locality, the more observant an absentee who had
just returned, for while hi