He lifted his brows.  “That’s a queer argument from you.  And, besides, I’m up to the tricks of all those ague-holes.  And I’ve got to live, you see:  I’ve got something to put through.”  He saw my look of enquiry, and added with a shy, poignant laugh—­how I hear it still!—­:  “I don’t mean only the job in hand, though that’s enough in itself; but Paul’s work—­you understand.—­It won’t come in my day, of course—­I’ve got to accept that—­but my boy’s a splendid chap” (the boy was three), “and I tell you what it is, old man, I believe when he grows up he’ll put it through.”

Halidon went to the Mananas, and for two years the journals brought me incidental reports of the work he was accomplishing.  He certainly had found a job to his hand:  official words of commendation rang through the country, and there were lengthy newspaper leaders on the efficiency with which our representative was prosecuting his task in that lost corner of our colonies.  Then one day a brief paragraph announced his death—­“one of the last victims of the pestilence he had so successfully combated.”

That evening, at my club, I heard men talking of him.  One said:  “What’s the use of a fellow wasting himself on a lot of savages?” and another wiseacre opined:  “Oh, he went off because there was friction at home.  A fellow like that, who knew the East, would have got through all right if he’d taken the proper precautions.  I saw him before he left, and I never saw a man look less as if he wanted to live.”

I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted cigar on his complacent knuckles.

“I never knew a man,” I exclaimed, “who had better reasons for wanting to live!”

A handsome youth mused:  “Yes, his wife is very beautiful—­but it doesn’t follow—­”

And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon’s friend.

THE PRETEXT

I

MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the narrow stairs to her bedroom.

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so quickly:  hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.

Her blushes?  Was she really blushing?

She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim dressing-table:  just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its relics.  The face reflected in this unflattering surface—­for even the mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation—­did not seem, at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was forced upon her.