pped his excellent coffee, and lounged
about the place in uncertain mood. He unburdened himself to the doctor
as they drank tea together late in the afternoon.

"I am not in the least keen on hunting," he confessed, "and I feel like
a horrible sponge, but all the same I have a queer sort of feeling that
I'd like to see Von Ragastein again. Your silent chief rather fascinates
me, Herr Doctor. He is a man. He has something which I have lost."

"He is a great man," the doctor declared enthusiastically. "What he sets
his mind to do, he does."

"I suppose I might have been like that," Dominey sighed, "if I had had
an incentive. Have you noticed the likeness between us, Herr Doctor?"

The latter nodded.

"I noticed it from the first moment of your arrival," he assented. "You
are very much alike yet very different. The resemblance must have been
still more remarkable in your youth. Time has dealt with your features
according to your deserts."

"Well, you needn't rub it in," Dominey protested irritably.

"I am rubbing nothing in," the doctor replied with unruffled calm. "I
speak the truth. If you had been possessed of the same moral stamina as
His Excellency, you might have preserved your health and the things that
count. You might have been as useful to your country as he is to his."

"I suppose I am pretty rocky?"

"Your constitution has been abused. You still, however, have much
vitality. If you cared to exercise self-control for a few months, you
would be a different man.--You must excuse. I have work."

Dominey spent three restless days. Even the sight of a herd of elephants
in the river and that strange, fierce chorus of night sounds, as beasts
of prey crept noiselessly around the camp, failed to move him. For the
moment his love of sport, his last hold upon the world of real things,
seemed dead. What did it matter, the killing of an animal more or
less? His mind was fixed uneasily upon the past, searching always for
something which he failed to discover. At dawn he watched for that
strangely wonderful, transforming birth of the day, and at night he sat
outside the banda, waiting till the mountains on the other side of
the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness. His
conversation with Von Ragastein had unsettled him. Without knowing
definitely why, he wanted him back again. Memories that had long since
ceased to torture were finding their way once more into his brain.
On the first day he had str