Colonel Ray smiled grimly.

“That was like old Stephen Ducaine,” he remarked.  “He died himself a few years afterwards.”

“Three years.”

“He left you ten thousand pounds.  What have you done with it?”

“Mr. Heathcote, of Heathcote, Sons, and Vyse, was my solicitor.”

“Well?”

I remembered that he had been away from England for several years.

“The firm failed,” I told him, “for a quarter of a million.  Mr. Heathcote shot himself.  I am told that there is a probable dividend of sixpence-half-penny in the pound to come some day.”

Colonel Ray smoked on in silence.  This was evidently news to him.

“Awkward for you,” he remarked at last.

I laughed a little bitterly.  I knew quite well that he was expecting me to continue, and I did so.

“I sold my things at Magdalen, and paid my debts.  I was promised two pupils if I would take a house somewhere on this coast.  I took one and got ready for them with my last few pounds.  Their father died suddenly—­and they did not come.  I got rid of the house, at a sacrifice, and came to this cottage.”

“You took your degree?”

“With honours.”

He blew out more smoke.

“You are young,” he said, “a gentleman by birth, and I should imagine a moderate athlete.  You have an exceptional degree, and I presume a fair knowledge of the world.  Yet you appear to be deliberately settling down here to starve.”

“I can assure you,” I answered, “that the deliberation is lacking.  I have no fear of anything of the sort.  I expect to get some pupils in the neighbourhood, and also some literary work.  For the moment I am a little hard up, and I thought perhaps that I might make a few shillings by a lecture.”

“Of the proceeds of which,” he remarked, with a dry little smile, “I appear to have robbed you.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I hoped for little but a meal or two from it,” I answered.  “The only loss is to my self-respect.  I owe to charity what I might have earned.”

He took his pipe from his mouth and looked at me with a thin derisive smile.

“You talk,” he said, “like a very young man.  If you had knocked about in all corners of the world as I have you would have learnt a greater lesson from a greater book.  When a man meets brother man in the wilds, who talks of charity?  They divide goods and pass on.  Even the savages do this.”

“These,” I ventured to remark, “are not the wilds.”

He sighed and replaced his pipe in his mouth.

“You are young, very young,” he remarked, thoughtfully.  “You have that beastly hothouse education, big ideas on thin stalks, orchids instead of roses, the stove instead of the sun.  The wilds are everywhere—­on the Thames Embankment, even in this God-forsaken corner of the world.  The wilds are wherever men meet men.”