were to
some purpose and of benefit to the community in general, I consider you
are doing something worth while."

"Exactly," Sir Alister replied. "From my earliest boyhood I have always
had the strangest hankering for the East. I say strange, because to my
parents it was inexplicable, neither of them having the slightest
leaning in that direction, though to me it seemed the most natural
desire in the world. I was like an alien in a foreign land, longing to
get home. I recollect, as a child, my nurse thought me a beastly uncanny
kid because I loved to lie in bed and listen to the cats howling and
fighting outside. I used to put my head half under the blankets and
imagine I was in my lair in the jungle, and those were the jackals and
panthers prowling around outside."

"I suppose you'd been reading adventure books," Uncle Bob said, with a
laugh. "I played at much the same game when I was a youngster, only in
my case it was Redskins."

"Possibly," Sir Alister answered with a slight shrug, "only mine wasn't
a game that I played with any other boys, it was a gnawing desire, which
simply had to be satisfied; and the opportunity came. When I was
fourteen, the father of a school friend of mine, who was going out to
India, asked me to go out with him and the boy for the trip. Of course,
I went."

"I wonder," the Major remarked, "that you ever came back once you got
there, since you were so frightfully keen."

"I was certain I should return," he replied grimly.

A pause followed his last words, then Uncle Bob rose and led the way to
the drawing-room, where for the remainder of the evening Sir Alister was
chiefly monopolised by the ladies.

* * * * *

"Well, Maurice," Uncle Bob said, when on the following evening I was
sitting in his study having my usual before-dinner chat with him, "and
how do you like Ethne's future husband?"

I hesitated. "I--I really don't know," I replied.

"Come, boy," he said, with his whimsical smile, "why not be frank and
own to a very natural jealousy?"

"Because," I answered simply, "the feeling Sir Alister Moeran inspires
in me is not jealousy, curiously enough. It's something else, something
indefinable that comes over me now and again. Dogs don't like him, and
that's always a bad sign, to my thinking."

My uncle's bushy eyebrows went up slightly.

"When did you make this discovery?"

"This morning," I replied. "You know I took him and Ethne round the