II

Twelve years have passed since Bottles sent in his papers, and in twelve
years many things happen. Amongst them recently it had happened that our
hero's only and elder brother had, owing to an unexpected development
of consumption among the expectant heirs, tumbled into a baronetcy and
eight thousand a year, and Bottles himself into a modest but to him most
ample fortune of as many hundred. When the news reached him he was the
captain of a volunteer corps engaged in one of the numerous Basuto wars
in the Cape Colony. He served the campaign out, and then, in obedience
to his brother's entreaties and a natural craving to see his native
land, after an absence of nearly fourteen years, resigned his commission
and returned to England.

Thus it came to pass that the next scene of this little history opens,
not upon the South African veld, or in a whitewashed house in some
half-grown, hobbledehoy colonial town, but in a set of the most
comfortable chambers in the Albany, the local and appropriate habitation
of the bachelor brother aforesaid, Sir Eustace Peritt.

In a very comfortable arm-chair in front of a warm fire (for the month
is November) sits the Bottles of old days--bigger, uglier, shyer than
ever, and in addition, disfigured by an assegai wound through the cheek.
Opposite to him, and peering at him occasionally with fond curiosity
through an eyeglass, is his brother, a very different stamp of man.
Sir Eustace Peritt is a well-preserved, London-looking gentleman, of
apparently any age between thirty and fifty. His eye is so bright, his
figure so well preserved, that to judge from appearances alone you would