having seen his protégé installed, he walked away unconscious of a morn
to dawn when Mr. Sands would recur as an instance of that bread upon the
waters which returns after many days.




CHAPTER VIII

HOW STORRI WOOED MRS. HANWAY-HARLEY


Storri was a sensualist to his fingers' ends. Being a sensualist, he was
perforce an egotist, and the smallest of his desires became the star by
which he laid his course. Through stress of appetites, as powerful as
they were gross, he had grown sharp to calculate, and quick to see. He
was controlled and hurried down by currents of a turbid selfishness; nor
would he have stopped at any cruelty, balked at any crime, when prompted
of what brute hungers kept his soul awake. He might have wept over
failure, never from remorse. And Storri had set his savage heart on
Dorothy.

Dorothy felt an aversion to Storri, and she could not have told you why.
The mystery of it, however, put no question to her; she yielded with
folded hands, passive to its influence. She did not hate Storri, she
shrunk from him; his nearness chilled her like the nearness of a
reptile. Kipling, the matchless, tells how a Russian does not become
alarming until he tucks in his shirt, and insists upon himself as the
most Eastern of Western peoples instead of the most Western of Eastern
peoples. There is truth to sit at the bottom of this. Dorothy would have