more intellectual brow, would have made him the best type of conquering,
civilising Briton. He came of good family, but had small inheritance;
his tongue told of age-long domination; his physique and carriage showed
the horseman, the game-stalker, the nomad. Hugh had never bent over
books since the day when he declined the university and got leave to
join Colonel Bosworth's exploring party in the Caucasus. After a boyhood
of straitened circumstances, he profited by a skilful stewardship which
allowed him to hope for some seven hundred a year; his elder brother,
Miles, a fine fellow, who went into the army, pinching himself to
benefit Hugh and their sister Ruth. Miles was now Major Carnaby, active
on the North-West Frontier. Ruth was wife of a missionary in some land
of swamps; doomed by climate, but of spirit indomitable. It seemed
strange that Hugh, at five and thirty, had done nothing particular.
Perhaps his income explained it -- too small for traditional purposes,
just large enough to foster indolence. For Hugh had not even followed up
his promise of becoming an explorer; he had merely rambled, mostly in
pursuit of fowl or quadruped. When he married, all hope for him was at
an end. The beautiful and brilliant daughter of a fashionable widow, her
income a trifle more than Carnaby's own; devoted to the life of cities,
wherein she shone; an enchantress whose spell would not easily be
broken, before whom her husband bowed in delighted subservience -- such
a woman might flatter Hugh's pride, but could scarce be expected to draw
out his latent energies and capabilities. This year, for the first time,
he had visited no wild country; his journeying led only to Paris, to
Vienna. In due season he shot his fifty brace on somebody's grouse-moor,
but the sport did not exhilarate him.

An odd and improbable alliance, that between Hugh Carnaby and Harvey
Rolfe. Yet in several ways they suited each other. Old-time memories had
a little, not much, to do with it; more of the essence of the matter was