In riding-kit, with boots from Peter Yapp, he looked, except for the headcovering, exactly like an Englishman.

Certainly the shape of the face was slightly more oval than is common to the sons of a northern race, but nothing really out of the ordinary, just as the eyes were an ordinary kind of brown, with a disconcerting way of looking suddenly into your face, sweeping it in an all-comprehensive lightning glance and looking indifferently away.

The nose was good and quite straight; the hair thick, brown and controllable; the mouth covering the perfect teeth was deceptive, or maybe it was the strength of the jaw which belied the gentleness, just as the slimness of the six-foot of body, trained to a hair from babyhood, gave no clue to the steel muscles underlying a skin as white as and a good deal whiter than that of some Europeans.

He moved with the quickness and quietness of those accustomed to the far horizon as a background; he was slow in speech; and dead-slow in anger until aroused by opposition.

For the physically weak-born, he had the gentle sympathy of the very strong; for the physically undeveloped and the morally weak he had no use whatever—­none.  In the West, his reserve with men had been labelled taciturnity or swollen-headeduess, which did not fit the case at all; whilst, in spite of his perfect manner towards them, his indifference to woman en masse or in the individual was supreme and sincere.

He was the direct descendant of the founder of Nineveh where horses were concerned, and his stables in the Oasis of Khargegh would have been one of the sights of Egypt, had he permitted sightseers.

Educated at Harrow, where he had excelled in sport and captained the Eleven at Lord’s for two succeeding years; respected by the upper Forms and worshipped by the lower, he had developed the English side of his dual nationality until masters and schoolfellows had come to look upon him as one of themselves.

From Harrow he had gone to Brazenose; then had quite suddenly thrown up the ’Varsity and returned to Egypt.

Love?

Not at all, for was not his indifference to woman supreme and sincere?

Just the inevitable ending of a very commonplace, sordid little story which had taught the youth one of life’s bitterest lessons.

One of a multitude of guests at Hurdley Castle, he had met a woman, beautiful but predatory, whose looks were taking on an autumnal tint, and whose banking account had shrivelled under the frost of extravagance.

His utter indifference to her wiles and her beauty had culminated in a degrading scene of anger on her part, when, forgetting her breeding, her birth and her nationality, she had first of all twitted him and then openly laughed at his mixed parentage.

He had stood without uttering a word, white to the lips during her tirade.

“Do you think that any white woman would marry you—­a half-caste?” had cried the woman, whose bills were coming in in shoals.