scenes far removed in climate, faith and civilization from those heretofore familiar can hardly fail to be.  India, and all which India stands for in English history, challenged his imagination, challenged his ambition, since in virtue of his nationality, young and inexperienced though he was, he went to her as a natural ruler, the son of a conquering race.  And this last thought begot in him not only exultation but an unwonted seriousness.  While, as he thus meditated, from out the dazzle as of mirage, a single figure grew into force and distinctness of outline, a figure which from his childhood had appealed to him with an attraction at once sinister and heroic—­that, namely, of a certain soldier and ex-Indian official, his kinsman, to pay a politic tribute of respect to whom was the object of his present excursion.

In Catholic countries the World gives its children to the Church.  In Protestant countries the process is not infrequently reversed, the Church giving its children to the World, and that with an alacrity which argues remarkable faith and courage—­of a sort!  Archdeacon Verity had carefully planned this visit for his son, although it obliged the young man to leave home two days earlier than he need otherwise have done.  It was illuminating to note how the father brought all the resources of a fine presence, an important manner and full-toned archidiaconal voice to bear upon proving the expediency of the young man visiting this particular relation, over whose career and reputation he had so often, in the past, pursed up his lips and shaken his head for the moral benefit of the domestic circle.

For the Archdeacon, in common with the majority of the Verity family, was animated by that ineradicable distrust of anything approaching genius which distinguishes the English country, or rather county, mind.  And that Sir Charles Verity had failed to conform to the family tradition of solid, unemotional, highly respectable, and usually very wealthy, mediocrity was beyond question.  He had struck out a line for himself; and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one.  This the Archdeacon, being a good Conservative, disapproved.  It worried him sadly, making him actually, if unconsciously, exceedingly jealous.  And precisely on that account, by an ingenious inversion of reasoning, he felt he owed it to abstract justice—­in other words to his much disgruntled self—­to make all possible use of this offending, this renegade personage, when opportunity of so doing occurred.  Now, learning on credible authority that Sir Charles’s name was still one to conjure with in India, it clearly became his duty to bid his son seek out and secure whatever modicum of advantage—­in the matter of advice and introductions—­might be derivable from so irritating a source.

All of which, while jumping with his own desires, caused Tom much sly mirth.  For might it not be counted among the satisfactory results of his deposition of heavy baggage at Radley’s that, for the first time in his life, he was at liberty to regard even his father, Thomas Pontifex Verity, Archdeacon of Harchester and Rector of Canton Magna, in a true perspective?  And he laughed again, though this time softly, indulgently, able in the plenitude of youthful superiority to extend a kindly tolerance towards the foibles and ingenuous hypocrisies of poor middle-age.