take a path which led into a shadowy future. In obedience
to an impulse stronger than himself he had taken the short cut to what
awaited him.

For a few minutes he stood outside the palings, trying to choke down an
abominable lump in his throat. This was not his first visit to Harrow.
At the end of the previous term, he had ascended the Hill to pass the
entrance examination. A master from his preparatory school accompanied
him, an Etonian, who had stared rather superciliously--so John
thought--at buildings less venerable than those which Henry VI raised
near Windsor. John, who had perceptions, was elusively conscious that
his companion, too much of a gentleman to give his thoughts words, might
be contrasting a yeoman's work with a king's; and when the Etonian,
gazing across the plains below to where Windsor lay, a soft shadow upon
the horizon, said abruptly, "I wish Eton had been built upon a hill,"
John replied effusively: "Oh, sir, it _is_ decent of you to say that."
The examination, however, distracted his attention from all things save
the papers. To his delight he found these easy, and, as soon as he left
the examination-room, he was popped into a cab and taken back to town.
Coming down the flight of steps, he had seen a few boys hurrying up or
down the road. At these the Etonian cocked a twinkling eye.

"Queer kit you Harrow boys wear," he said.

John, inordinately grateful at this recognition of himself as an
Harrovian, forgave the gibe. It had struck him, also, that the shallow
straw hat, the swallow-tail coat, did look queer, but he regarded them
reverently as the uniform of a crack corps.

To-day, standing by the iron palings, John reviewed the events of the
last hour. The view was blurred by unshed tears. His uncle and he had
driven together to the Manor. Here, the explorer had exercised his
peculiar personal magnetism upon the house-master, a tall, burly man of
truculent aspect and speech. John realized proudly that his uncle was
the bigger of the two, and the giant acknowledged, perhaps grudgingly,
the dwarf's superiority. The talk, short enough, had wandered into
Darkest Africa. His uncle, as usual, said little, replying almost in
monosyllables to the questions of his host; but John junior told himself
exultantly that it was not necessary for Uncle John to talk; the wide
world knew what he had done.

Then his house-master, Rutford, had told John where to buy his first
straw hat.

"You can get one wi