He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night wanderings.

A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.

He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and thoughtfully.

Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of water, and the ruins of an old embankment.  It was the ancient tank of his overnight encounter.  The pool of his dream?

With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the sandy level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last found, and then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several sorts of deer and the footprints of many biggish birds, first the great spoor of the tiger and then his own.  Here the beast had halted, and here it had leapt aside.  Here his own footmarks stopped.  Here his heels had come together.

It had been no dream.

There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-space wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine.  Then the ground had looked like a floor of frosted silver.

And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just as the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from which he had strayed overnight.  It was, he found, a longer way back to the camp than he remembered it to be.  Perhaps he had struck the path further along.  It curved about and went up and down and crossed three ravines.  At last he came to that trampled place of littered white blossom under great trees where he had seen the bears.

The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet.  The dew had gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots before he came back into the open space about the great banyan and the tents.  And Kepple, refreshed by a night’s rest and coffee, was wondering loudly where the devil he had gone.

THE STORY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE BOY GROWS UP

1

Benham was the son of a schoolmaster.  His father was assistant first at Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then he became head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a high-class preparatory school at Seagate.  He was extremely successful for some years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, and then disaster overtook him in the shape of a divorce.  His wife, William Porphyry’s mother, made the acquaintance of a rich young man named Nolan, who was recuperating at Seagate from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a gun accident in Brazil.  She ran away with him, and she was divorced.  She was, however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden only three days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree absolute.  Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise and sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey Marayne, the great London surgeon.