slight wound—­David insisted it was slight, a fuss about nothing, because he had enquired about necrosis of the jaw and realized that even if he had recovered it would have left indisputable marks on face and throat.  In fact there were so many complications involved in an escape from the Boers, only to be justified under the code of honour prevailing in war time, that he would rather his father said little or nothing about South Africa but left him to explain all that.  A point of view readily grasped by the Revd.  Howel, who to get such a son back would even have not thought too badly of desertion—­and the negative letters of the War Office said nothing of that.

So early in September, after the most varied, anxious, successful six weeks in his life—­so far—­David Vavasour Williams returned to Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple.

CHAPTER V

READING FOR THE BAR

It had been a hot, windless day in London, in early September.  Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court was already seared and a little shrivelled.  The privet hedges were almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour.  It was now an evening, ending one of those days which are peculiarly disheartening to a Londoner returned from a long stay in the depths of the country—­a country which has hills and streams, ferny hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of lush, emerald-green grass, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks, orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or even a lake.  The exhausted London to which David Williams had returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its West-end and City population—­just, in fact, most of its interesting if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde Park, in a box at the theatre:  yet the frowsy, worthy millions were there all the same.  The air of its then smelly streets was used up and had the ammoniac strench of the stable.  It was a weary London.  The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.  Provincial companies enjoyed—­a little anxiously owing to uncertain receipts at the box office—­a brief license on the boards of famous play-houses.  The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking.  The South African War had reached its dreariest stage....