Rupert Grant was
a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish
incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound to say
that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil's
opposing him, however banteringly.

I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I
could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.

"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that that
fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
Mullah and--"

"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you may
happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style;
he is too veracious."

"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert contemptuously,
"be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all
his life in one ancestral manor."

"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil
dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his
chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is
that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort
of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they
are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if
he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking."

"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather like a
sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
that truth is stranger than fiction?"

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil placidly.
"For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is
congenial to it."

"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. "Do
you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?"

"I believe Keith's words," answered the other. "He is an honest man."

"I should like to question a regiment of his landladies," said Rupert
cynically.

"I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely
in himself," I said mildly; "his mode of life--"

Befo