The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
page 14 of 323 (04%)
page 14 of 323 (04%)
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The latter nodded.
"I noticed it from the first moment of your arrival," he assented. "You are very much alike yet very different. The resemblance must have been still more remarkable in your youth. Time has dealt with your features according to your deserts." "Well, you needn't rub it in," Dominey protested irritably. "I am rubbing nothing in," the doctor replied with unruffled calm. "I speak the truth. If you had been possessed of the same moral stamina as His Excellency, you might have preserved your health and the things that count. You might have been as useful to your country as he is to his." "I suppose I am pretty rocky?" "Your constitution has been abused. You still, however, have much vitality. If you cared to exercise self-control for a few months, you would be a different man.--You must excuse. I have work." Dominey spent three restless days. Even the sight of a herd of elephants in the river and that strange, fierce chorus of night sounds, as beasts of prey crept noiselessly around the camp, failed to move him. For the moment his love of sport, his last hold upon the world of real things, seemed dead. What did it matter, the killing of an animal more or less? His mind was fixed uneasily upon the past, searching always for something which he failed to discover. At dawn he watched for that strangely wonderful, transforming birth of the day, and at night he sat outside the banda, waiting till the mountains on the other side of the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness. His |
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