rather more genial than the face, which was at the first
glance decidedly grim. It was a typically legal face, with angular
jaws and heavy, grizzled eyebrows; and it belonged to an eminently
legal character, though he was now attached in a semimilitary
capacity to the police of that wild district. Cuthbert Grayne was
perhaps more of a criminologist than either a lawyer or a policeman,
but in his more barbarous surroundings he had proved successful in
turning himself into a practical combination of all three. The
discovery of a whole series of strange Oriental crimes stood to his
credit. But as few people were acquainted with, or attracted to,
such a hobby or branch of knowledge, his intellectual life was
somewhat solitary. Among the few exceptions was Horne Fisher, who
had a curious capacity for talking to almost anybody about almost
anything.

"Studying botany, or is it archaeology?" inquired Grayne. "I shall
never come to the end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that
what you don't know isn't worth knowing."

"You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness, and
even bitterness. "It's what I do know that isn't worth knowing. All
the seamy side of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives
and bribery and blackmail they call politics. I needn't be so proud
of having been down all these sewers that I should brag about it to
the little boys in the street."

"What do you mean? What's the matter with you?" asked his friend.
"I never knew you taken like this before."

"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher. "I've just been throwing
cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy."

"Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal
expert.

"Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course,"
continued Fisher, "but I ought to know that at that age illusions
can be ideals. And they're better than the reality, anyhow. But
there is one very ugly responsibility about jolting a young man out
of the rut of the most rotten ideal."

"And what may that be?" inquired his friend.

"It's very apt to set him off with the same energy in a much worse
direction," answered Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a
bottomless pit as deep as the bottomless well."

Fisher did not see his friend until a fortnight later, when he found
himself in the garden at the back of the clubhouse on the opposite
side from the links, a garden heavily colored and scented with sweet
semitropic