summer heat, which I covet.

"Among men I am nothing; I may not claim equality with the scavenger of
the Western streets; or with the donkey-boys of the Eastern bazaar.
Here I am served with fear and servility, being a man of riches; across
the waters, I may sun myself in the smiles of women as long as I have
no desire to wed." He suddenly seized the woman, holding her in a grip
of iron which left great bruises on her arms. "Do you know what she
called me, Mother?--that harlot of a line of noblemen--what she flung
in my teeth because, seeing in her a woman of the streets hidden under
the cloak of marriage, I refused to be tempted?"

There fell a terrible silence, and then a few whispered words.

"She called me a half-caste, Mother!--me--a half-caste!"

And the mother fell at her son's feet and bowed her head to the ground,
and he swept her up into his arms, raining kisses upon the piteous face.

"I don't blame you, sweetheart-mother," he said in English, whilst she
sobbed on his heart. "Am I not the fruit of a brave woman's great
love? Could there be anything finer than that? But my father in me
made my whole body clamour for the desert when I was in England; my
mother in me makes my heart throb in the desert for just one hour of
her cool, misty country, one hour on a hill-top in which to watch the
pearl-gray dawn. Dearest, dearest, don't sob so. It is a case of two
affirmatives making a negative; two great nationalities decried,
derided, rendered null and void in their offspring through the dictates
of those who, in religion, prate that we are all brothers. I have just
got to stick it, my mother, and life is not very long. But I shall