grew more and more intense, the faces shinier, the air
more and more smoke-laden and heavy.

Shere Ali came on to the stage while the sailors were at work. He
exchanged a nod with "Colonel Joe," and took his seat in the front row of
chairs behind the ropes.

It was a rough gathering on the whole, though there were some men in
evening-dress besides Colonel Joe, and of these two sat beside Shere Ali.
They were talking together, and Shere Ali at the first paid no heed to
them. The trainers, the backers, the pugilists themselves were the men
who had become his associates in Calcutta. There were many of them
present upon the stage, and in turn they approached Shere Ali and spoke
to him with familiarity upon the chances of the fight. Yet in their
familiarity there was a kind of deference. They were speaking to a
patron. Moreover, there was some flattery in the attention with which
they waited to catch his eye and the eagerness with which they came at
once to his side.

"We are all glad to see you, sir," said a small man who had been a jockey
until he was warned off the turf.

"Yes," said Shere Ali with a smile, "I am among friends."

"Now who would you say was going to win this fight?" continued the
jockey, cocking his head with an air of shrewdness, which said as plainly
as words, "You are the one to tell if you will only say."

Shere Ali expanded. Deference and flattery, however gross, so long as
they came from white people were balm to his wounded vanity. The weeks in
Calcutta had worked more harm than Ralston had suspected. Shy of meeting
those who had once treated him as an equal, imagining when he did meet
them that now they only admitted him to their company on sufferance and
held him in their thoughts of no account, he had become avid for
recognition among the riff-raff of the town.

"I have backed the man from Singapore," he replied, "I know him. The
soldier is a stranger to me"; and gradually as he talked the voices of
his two neighbours forced themselves upon his consciousness. It was not
what they said which caught his attention. But their accents and the
pitch of their voices arrested him, and swept him back to his days at
Eton and at Oxford. He turned his head and looked carelessly towards
them. They were both young; both a year ago might have been his intimates
and friends. As it was, he imagined bitterly, they probably resented his
sitting even in the next chair to them.

The stage was now clear; the