“In a year, as I have said, I shall claim your answer.  And now farewell for a season.  When we next meet we shall have a larger common ground; we shall be master and pupil no longer.

“You shall see the boy once again, by his wish and my own.  He shall go with you to your house to-night, and travel with you the first stage to-morrow.  I have arranged for his return.”

He then conducted Arthur into the house, where he bade adieu to the mistress and to the younger son; the elder, his charge that was to be, meeting him as he came out, and accompanying him home.  The boy had formed a great attachment to him, and the idea of their future relations sent a strange and unwonted glow into Arthur’s mind, so that he parted from him on the next day, “with wonder in his heart,” and something very like an ache too.

This last episode will appear to my readers to be so fantastic as to give the work at once a fictional character; they will say that on some real lines I have constructed a romance of the wildest type, and that Arthur is no longer an interesting personality, because as a rule he is too ordinary to be ideal, in the last two chapters too illusory to be real.

All I can urge is this:  the chapters shall be their own defence.  If I had wished to present my readers with nothing but a dry chronicle of facts I should have toned this down to something more prosaic.  But every one who has had any experience of life will know that her surprises are sometimes very bewildering; that fiction is nothing but uncommon experience made ordinary, or heaped inartistically upon a single character.

It may be said that the man was mentally affected, in the latter scene; in the former, that Arthur himself was the victim of a mental disorder; but he left such vivid and detailed descriptions of both events that I have been enabled to give one (the letter) exactly as it stands, and the interview in Teheran is taken directly from diaries—­a little amplified and reconstructed, it is true, but only when interpreted by the light of later events.

And this must be always the task of the true biographer; for the biographer has to take a life en masse, and disentangling the predominant and central threads, cast the rest away; in this process rejecting facts and incidents whose isolated interest is often greater than the interest of what he retains, because it is on the latter that the pearls of life are, so to speak, strung.

In this case the two incidents I have kept are both so pregnant of influence upon his later life, so necessary to the logical development of his principles, that, in spite of their romantic, not to say wild, character, I have retained them.

CHAPTER VII