e able to do the hermit much over in Ceylon, will you?'

'I don't know. My father's plantation is in rather a remote part of
the island. I don't think he has ever been very intimate with the
other planters near him, and as I left the place when I was a child I
have fewer friends there than here even. But there will be plenty to
do if I am to learn the business, as he seems to wish.'

'Did he never think of having you over before?'

'He wanted me to come over and practise at the Colombo Bar, but that
was soon after I was called, and I preferred to try my fortune in
England first. I was the second son, you see, and while my brother
John was alive I was left pretty well to my own devices. I went, as
you know, to Colombo in my second Long, but only for a few weeks of
course, and my father and I didn't get on together somehow. But he's
ill now, and poor John died of dysentery, and he's alone, so even if I
had had any practice to leave I could hardly refuse to go out to him.
As it is, as far as that is concerned, I have nothing to keep me.'

They were walking down Rotten Row as Holroyd said this, with the dull
leaden surface of the Serpentine on their right, and away to the left,
across the tan and the grey sward, the Cavalry Barracks, with their
long narrow rows of gleaming windows. Up the long convex surface of
the Row a faint white mist was crawling, and a solitary,
spectral-looking horseman was cantering noiselessly out of it towards
them. The evening had almost begun; the sky had changed to a delicate
green tint, merged towards the west in a dusky crocus, against which
the Memorial spire stood out sharp and black; from South Kensington
came the sound of a church bell calling for some evening service.

'Doesn't that bell remind you somehow of Cambridge days?' said Mark.
'I could almost fancy we were walking up again from the boats, and
that was the chapel bell ringing.'

'I wish we were,' said Holroyd with a sigh: 'they were good old times,
and they will never come back.'

'You're very low, old fellow,' said Mark, 'for a man going back to his
native country.'

'Ah, but I don't feel as if it was my native country, you see. I've
lived here so long. And no one knows me out there except my poor old
father, and we're almost strangers. I'm leaving the few people I care
for behind me.'

'Oh, it will be all right,' said Mark, with the comfortable view one
takes of another's future; 'you'll get on well enough. We shall h