though inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew
the thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some
measure of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a
personal hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it,
Memory, passionate though elusive, flashed her strange signal of a
personal love. In this dream that mocked at time, this yearning that
forgot the intervening years, I nursed the impossible illusion that,
somehow or other, I should become aware of Marion.

Now, I have treated you in this letter as though you were a woman who
reads a novel, for in my first pages I have let you turn to the end
and see that the climax is a happy one, lest you should faint by the
way and close my story with a yawn. You need not do that, however,
since you already know this in advance. You will bear with me, too,
when I tell you that my return to England was in the nature of a
failure that, at first, involved sharpest disappointment. I was
unaware, as a whole, of the thrills I had anticipated with such
longing. The sweet picture of English loveliness I had cherished with
sentimental passion during my long exile hardly materialized.

That I was not a lion, but an insignificant quasi-colonial adventurer
among many others, may have sprinkled acid upon my daily diet of
sensation, but you will do me the justice to believe that this
wounded vanity was the smallest item in my disenchantment. Ten years,
especially in primitive, godforsaken Africa, is a considerable
interval; I found the relationship between myself and my beloved
home-land changed, and in an unexpected way.

I was not missed for one thing, I had been forgotten. Except from our
mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate