Many years had elapsed since Charles Verity spent a night upstairs in this part of the house, and by degrees those outdoor sounds attracted his attention as intimately familiar.  They carried him back to his boyhood, to the spacious dreams and projects of adolescence.  He could remember just such gusty wet winds swishing through the trees, such petulant fingering of errant creepers upon the windows, when he stayed here during the holidays from school at Harchester, on furlough from his regiment, and, later, on long leave from India, during his wonderful little great-uncle’s lifetime.

And his thought took a lighter and friendlier vein, recalling that polished, polite, encyclopedic minded and witty gentleman, who had lived to within a few months of his full century with a maximum of interest and entertainment to himself, and a minimum of injury or offence to others.  To the last he retained his freshness of intellectual outlook, his insatiable yet discreet curiosity.  Taking it as a whole, should his life be judged a singularly futile or singularly enviable one?  Nothing feminine, save on strictly platonic lines, was recorded to have entered it at any period.  Did that argue remarkable wisdom or defective courage, or some abnormal element in a composition otherwise deliciously mundane and human?

Charles had debated this often.  Even as a boy it had puzzled him.  As a young man he had held his own views on the subject, not without lasting effect.  For one winter he had passed at The Hard, in the fine bodily health and vigour of his early thirties, this very lack of women’s society contributed, by not unnatural reaction, to force the idea of woman hauntingly upon him—­thereby making possible a strange and hidden love passage off the Dead Sea fruit of which he was in process of supping here to-night.

He moved, bent forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms, closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his raised hands.  For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama re-lived and reenacted itself!

It dated far back, to a period when his career was still undetermined, hedged about by doubts and uncertainties—­before the magnificent and terrible years of the Mutiny brought him, not only fame and distinction, but a power of self-expression and of plain seeing.—­Before, too, his not conspicuously happy marriage.  Before the Bhutpur appointment tested and confirmed his reputation as a most able if most autocratic ruler.  Before, finally, his term of service under the Ameer in Afghanistan—­that extraordinary experience of alternate good and evil fortune in barbaric internecine warfare, the methods and sentiments of which represented a swing back of three or four centuries, Christianity, and the attitude of mind and conduct Christianity inculcates, no longer an even nominal factor, Mahomet, sword in hand, ruthlessly outriding Christ.