contour, and hated with the hatred of a jealous colleague for twenty years. To the sick man the comely health, vigor, and sanity of his visitor were so many offences. The fellow's appearance was too disgustingly satisfactory. Here was the subordinate whom he had sworn to break still unbroken, the comrade whom he had injured and maligned in vain, who had silently lived down his spite. He loathed him point by point and feature by feature with the unpardoning, personal animosity of the wrong-doer for the creature whom he has wronged.

He found himself beginning to shake. He had planned this interview, schooled himself for it; but now, at the first instant of contact, discovered that he had miscalculated his endurance; his three years' secretion of hatred came near to choking him; it surged to his lips with an almost physical revulsion; he gulped it down. Not yet not yet-presently.

"Haw, Justin, how d'ye do? I protest I am glad to see ye. Infinitely obliged, I'm sure. Be seated, I beg. Pardon my want of ceremony; I grow curst uncivil: 'tis the price one pays for this life servants, only servants to consider, ye see. What! no chair? None, as I live! I have but few white callers, ye know; but still I have a chair or two somewhere. My bearer shall smart for this, begad: Excuse my not rising. I get damned helpless. Will ye be pleased to collect cushions, rugs, anything as a makeshift? Thanks, I swear I am beholden to ye."

The visitor had not opened his lips since entering; he had bowed and bowed again. His reception surprised him, the manner of it was all wrong. Curt coolness might have passed, or any degree of civil reserve, but this offhand, de haut en bas assumption of superior geniality rang false; there

was nothing in the past relations of the two to justify it. The man upon the couch had not offered his hand at his entering, nor pleaded disablement in excuse; yet some infirmity seemed in the case, for the right hand and wrist lay motionless within the loose swathes of a silken shawl. All the life of the members seemed concentrated in those fleshless yellow fingers of the left hand, which tapped restlessly upon the lid of a small box within reach.

An awkward silence fell, mere vacuity, which Justin sought to fill with some murmured commonplace. The other was not attending, was insensible to the solecism and broke into a second soliloquy. "Damme, the fellow has worn well, dev'lish well! Ye are standing the climate better than any of us," he pursued, rousing, and addressing his visitor directly and clearly as one addresses a foreigner. ""Tis not your liver that is taking ye Home. Lucky dog! Ye were always a fellow of careful habits. Well, the mess had its laugh, but 'tis your turn to-dayat what is left of us."

Justin bowed with a grave little smile, attentive and watchful, but said nothing. He had no small-talk, nor desired to prolong the interview. He had arranged his cushions at his host's left hand, not too near: the room was large, hot, and empty of furniture. He observed with some surprise that the punkah hung motionless. He was amazed at the change in his late colonel, but hoped that he was successfully concealing his astonishment. The man was altered out of knowledge. He had come unprepared for such disguise. Not alone the beard. but the hair, white as old-age and long as a woman's, seemed extraordinary in one whom he had known as the most point device exponent of the military mode of his day.

Travis had adopted the native habit

-loose trousers, cummerbund, and voluminous silken jacket.

With Justin it was a fundamental conception that an Englishman in the East should respect his blood, and that declension to the native standard of morals was petty treason to the Company whose salt he ate. The man refused on principle to condescend in meats, dress, or manners, "Depend on't," he had once said, provoked to speak out by finding a subaltern chewing betel, "you won't conciliate these people by sinking to their level. They appreciate caste; let us maintain our own, one equally above Brahmin and Muslim." He was one of the few who never wore mufti, who would have as soon accepted dustoor upon a regimental contract as ridden with the short stirrup, and would have only relinquished his queue with his life.

To such a. precisian the spectacle presented by Colonel Travis was deplorable. The fellow had let himself go. The sensitive vanity of the déclassé was conscious of his guest's tacit disapproval, and resented it whilst endorsing its justice. The man felt his ground giving: he had lured his old subordinate to his house for a purpose of his own, but had mismanaged the piece badly; here, at the rising of the curtain, the other filled the centre of the stage, whilst his own pretension to the leading part was discounted by the costume of his choice, and his hectoring to the weak impertinence of a native.

"Damn it!" he muttered in his beard, "I should have known better; a fellow in his shirt-tails can't stand up to uniforms even in private.”

In a word, he saw himself as he was, and his enemy as he might have been: one of those men who carry their middle-age so easily-the sort that throws off or pulls through illness to which fellows of bulkier physique

succumb; a man with unsuspected reserves of endurance at call, who had repeatedly worn down younger and more muscular men upon the march, until at length "Justin's luck" had become a proverb with his mess.

"Ye don't answer me, I say! (Why the devil can't he speak?)" snarled the sick man with the sudden impatience of an invalid. "I asked ye why ye have come to see me, eh?" (He had asked nothing of the sort, but was unaware that the question which was puzzling him had not passed his lips.)

"I beg your pardon; I assure you I did not catch what ye said. Silk scrapes so, ye know. Why?-wellmy dear sir, because ye sent for me. Why else?"

"That's so; I did, begad," muttered the other.

"And now that I'm here what can I do for ye, or rather, what d'ye want me to do for ye?"

The distinction savored of fineness, but the speaker was constitutionally wary; also he knew his man.

""Twas monstrous good of ye to come," said the other, fencing the question. "Considering the terms we have been upon, I never thought to see ye under my roof. My roof!" His eye roved over, the walls and floor: a slipper too small for a man's use lay in a corner. "Custom of the country, Justin, but 'tis the very devil. Ye did well to stick to your bachelor quarters; what with the women, and the children (what on earth is a gentleman to do with a brown family at Home? -or here?) and the debts (this place is mortgaged for more than it will ever fetch. That is why the sowkar fellow don't foreclose). Ye'll be saying 'What has the man done with the pagodas?' Phew! they simply went. You are going Home, they tell me" (a keen, veiled glance went after the words), "but there's no going Home for me: the only way out of it is to die of it,

sir: yes, die out of it and cheat the sharks. And that is what I'm doing as fast as I can." His voice slowed down to a husky whisper, his face turned from his visitor, his hand went creeping out to that box upon the table within reach. Justin, with pity in his fine face, saw what was coming, and frowned slightly as his comrade of other years, his commanding officer and enemy since, swallowed the drug which had ruined him, but without which he was now incapable of concentrated thought or continuous conversation.

In another minute he was another man: his eye filled, his voice gathered volume, there seemed less languor or more purpose in his attitude.

"Why did ye come?" he asked again; and this time there was a depth of crafty undertone which did not altogether escape the man he addressed.

"Are Plassy men getting so common?" began Justin, but the other broke in:

"Pélasi? I'm not quite the last. There's Rumbold. You are to carry his despatches, I hear. He must have granted you an interview. You will have sate at his table, or will to-night before sailing? I thought as much!and will drink his wine (as Stuart drank Pigot's the night he betrayed him). Your pardon; no offence! O yes, Rumbold is a Pélasi man, took his wound there. When he offers ye his hand presently, will it feel sticky? Mind ye, there's Pigot blood between the fingers. Ye know it!" with sudden heat which as suddenly cooled. "Ah, Pélasi; yes, I was there." He drew deeper breath and for the moment looked almost noble. "You came out later, Wandewash was your first affair."

Justin nodded. "But, Pélasi; there was never another battle like that in our time, or in any other, surely. "Twas the beginning of it all. Hotter affairs perhaps, but we did

know the odds and we didn't know the niggers wouldn't fight. And, as ye are thinking, we need not backbite one another, for there's mighty few of us left. Twenty years of the climate plays the deuce with a man's constitution. (It hasn't touched his, begad!) Ye are pitying me. I swear I will not be pitied: d'ye hear me? Tut-tut! Your pardon's begged, 'tis part of my complaint-physical, purely physical.

A damnable habit, this, ye are thinking," he tapped the box, "and the fellow is a slave to it, a man that was once a fine soldier, but, damme, what would ye have me do? It will be the death of me, I grant ye; but to swear off is past mortal endurance. (Does he think I've not tried that he looks at me like that?) I learned the trick from him, a man if ever the Almighty made one, but it gripped him; I'm told he's dying."

Justin divined that he spoke of Clive, and that he had not heard of his death. The invalid seemed exciting himself, talking against time, nerving himself for a task to which he found himself unequal. There was nothing for Justin but to await the man's pleasure: he had his own hand to play later.

"There were sixteen of us at the council of war in the tope before the action," muttered Travis. "As junior I had spoken first. 'Attack at once!' was my word. Coote smacked his thigh and backed me when his turn came, but the Chief was cold. Fiftythree heavy bullock-guns served by French are brutally heavy odds against six little brass field pieces."

Not a

sion of a Moharrum riot; a failure sudden, abject, irrecoverable, such as lies in wait for the victims of the drug. Since that day the regiment had never beheld the face of its former commandant.

It

That Justin had seen nothing of him meanwhile was not surprising. was many years since the men had been upon any but service terms. They had messed together, fought and marched in company without exchanging a word that was not demanded by the exigencies of their duties. All this had been notorious to their subalterns and colleagues who had amused themselves with watching Travis's bitter but impotent malice, and the cool, deferential displeasure with which Justin held his enemy at arm's-length. The trouble, whatever it was, had begun when the men were subalterns, had continued whilst they commanded opposite wings, and in no way had abated when one was promoted to the colonelcy, nor when that brief period of command had closed in disgrace.

Whatever had been the opinion of the mess in the old. days, the sympathy of his fellows had for long been accorded to the man who in a difficult position had borne himself with dignity, and had never been known to speak ill of a persistent traducer.

"Yes, I sent for ye-(didn't think for a moment he'd come, though)-sent for ye, Justin, to ask ye a plain question or it might run to two."

It was coming then, coming at last. Major Justin's eye was upon his interrogator. He signified by a grave, silent inclination.

ine. He was always my master in repartee, damn him!") he muttered; then aloud, "I repeat, why didn't ye send me your friend?" "When?"

"When! he says 'when.' Curse ye, sir, ye shall not fence my question! When, indeed! Well, after Wandewash."

"The circumstances of that affair, Colonel Travis-" began Justin, weighing his words; but the other took him up impetuously.

"The circumstances of that affair are not unknown to me, sir. You saved my life. Have I ever repudiated the service? That I bitterly resented it, and do still resent it, is beside the mark. Enough that ye put it out of my power to send my friend to you. But I had given ye ample occasión before that affair, and have, as I think, given ye enough since, to justify ye in seeking, or seizing, or makinghave it your own way-a path out of an impossible position. And now ye are going Home. (The fellow thinks to see her!)-and will see her." The voice ran up into head-notes, the face grew distorted with passion, the fingers of the left hand contracted, but the hidden right hand, which Justin now suspected to be paralyzed, lay motionless under its wraps.

"Her-her," he repeated himself with a smack of the lip and facial contortions painful to witness.

"Colonel Travis," interrupted Justin, rising, "I have entered your house at your particular request, upon a matter of business-you expressly wrote 'business.' But there are matters

"Neither you nor I, Travis, have at all times governed ourselves according to the opinion of the mess."

Travis's eye contracted, he sucked in his moustache. ("A compliment paid to himself and a back-hander for

with ye."

"I beg to wish ye a good-day," interposed Justin rapidly, his hand upon the hanging chick in the doorway.

"Cross that threshold at your peril, sir. I mean it!" cried the sick man, with a kind of breathless savagery, sitting suddenly up and whipping a pistol from under that shawl with his hitherto concealed right hand. "She is my wife still," covering his man with his weapon at the toise. "Swear! I say, swear! Down on your knees, sir. I'll give ye whilst I count five. One-two-three! Swear, ye fool!... or I blow the brains out of your head -four-fi—"

The explosion in that confined space seemed to lift the ceiling; smoke filled the room, through which Justin, still standing, saw his would-be murderer drop the smoking barrel and wring his pistol-hand with a gesture of pain for a moment ere he snatched a phial from beneath his pillow. He divined that the man was about to destroy himself. In two strides he was beside the couch and had taken the phial from the nerveless fingers that held it, and was bending over his enemy. The wretch fell back, bleating hoarsely: "Let me die! You are the better man-always were. Ye have me all round. To miss such a mark! -overcharged, of course; the thing threw high and has gone near to break ing my wrist." He lay back gasping and whimpering, a deplorable spectacle. Justin, standing over him, had released his enemy's wrist; straightening his back, he drew three long breaths, collecting himself and counting. When his voice was steady enough he spoke.

"Travis, listen to me, recollect your self, sir; I have news for ye. Is it possible that ye have not heard? Have ye no correspondent in England? None? Good God! Then ye did not know that your wife has been dead these twelve months."

"Besides what? Ye saw my hand shaking? It was that. The fellow sees what a wreck of a thing I am got to, and prefers to stand his chance, begad! He was safer so than on the move, by the Lord! And I could snuff a candle with the hair-trigger in my time."

Justin looked down upon this spectacle of ulcerated vanity with disgust. What held him there? It would seem that he had something to ask in his turn, and that the moment for asking it had come.

Nineteen men out of twenty would have been hurried by emotion into hasty action of some sort by such an outrage as this to which he had been subjected. He had been enormously surprised, and his pulses were still hammering, for even an old soldier, habituated to the ruses and night alarms of eastern warfare, cannot look into a loaded barrel for five seconds without a shock; but the resolution which had held him rigid before that barrel, lest by rash movement he should convert to a catastrophe what he hoped was but a threat, kept him steady in the dangerous moment of reaction. He saw his game clearly now; reproaches would spoil all; he was experiencing the elation of the player who sees that a slip of his opponent has given him mate in three moves.

Vacant apathy had followed the anguish of chagrin. The crash of the discharge had been succeeded by the breathless silence of a listening house