“He is a great man,” the doctor declared enthusiastically.  “What he sets his mind to do, he does.”

“I suppose I might have been like that,” Dominey sighed, “if I had had an incentive.  Have you noticed the likeness between us, Herr Doctor?”

The latter nodded.

“I noticed it from the first moment of your arrival,” he assented.  “You are very much alike yet very different.  The resemblance must have been still more remarkable in your youth.  Time has dealt with your features according to your deserts.”

“Well, you needn’t rub it in,” Dominey protested irritably.

“I am rubbing nothing in,” the doctor replied with unruffled calm.  “I speak the truth.  If you had been possessed of the same moral stamina as His Excellency, you might have preserved your health and the things that count.  You might have been as useful to your country as he is to his.”

“I suppose I am pretty rocky?”

“Your constitution has been abused.  You still, however, have much vitality.  If you cared to exercise self-control for a few months, you would be a different man.—­You must excuse.  I have work.”

Dominey spent three restless days.  Even the sight of a herd of elephants in the river and that strange, fierce chorus of night sounds, as beasts of prey crept noiselessly around the camp, failed to move him.  For the moment his love of sport, his last hold upon the world of real things, seemed dead.  What did it matter, the killing of an animal more or less?  His mind was fixed uneasily upon the past, searching always for something which he failed to discover.  At dawn he watched for that strangely wonderful, transforming birth of the day, and at night he sat outside the banda, waiting till the mountains on the other side of the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness.  His conversation with Von Ragastein had unsettled him.  Without knowing definitely why, he wanted him back again.  Memories that had long since ceased to torture were finding their way once more into his brain.  On the first day he had striven to rid himself of them in the usual fashion.

“Doctor, you’ve got some whisky, haven’t you?” he asked.

The doctor nodded.

“There is a case somewhere to be found,” he admitted.  “His Excellency told me that I was to refuse you nothing, but he advises you to drink only the white wine until his return.”

“He really left that message?”

“Precisely as I have delivered it.”

The desire for whisky passed, came again but was beaten back, returned in the night so that he sat up with the sweat pouring down his face and his tongue parched.  He drank lithia water instead.  Late in the afternoon of the third day, Von Ragastein rode into the camp.  His clothes were torn and drenched with the black mud of the swamps, dust and dirt were thick upon his face.  His pony almost collapsed as he swung himself off.  Nevertheless, he paused to greet his guest with punctilious courtesy, and there was a gleam of real satisfaction in his eyes as the two men shook hands.