few lights showing dimly in the windows on the opposite side of
the quadrangle served only to intensify the gloom. The time
dragged. Fretfully he drummed with his fingers on the leaded
panes, his ears alert for any sound beyond the closed door. The
echo of a distant organ stole into the room and the soft solemn
notes harmonised with the melancholy pattering of the raindrops
and the gusts of wind that moaned fitfully around the house.

In a sudden revulsion of feeling the life he had mapped out
for himself seemed horrible beyond thought. He could not bear
it. It would be tying his hands and burdening himself with a
responsibility that would curtail his freedom and hamper him
beyond endurance. A great restlessness, a longing to escape from
the irksome tie, came to him. Solitude and open spaces; unpeopled
nature; wild desert wastes--he craved for them. The want was like
a physical ache. The desert--he drew his breath in sharply--the
hot shifting sand whispering under foot, the fierce noontide sun
blazing out of a brilliant sky, the charm of it! The fascination
of its false smiling surface, its treacherous beauty luring to
hidden perils called to him imperatively. The curse of Ishmael
that was his heritage was driving him as it had driven him many
times before. He was in the grip of one of the revolts against
restraint and civilisation that periodically attacked him. The
wander-hunger was in his blood--for generations it had sent
numberless ancestors into the lonely places of the world, and
against it ties of home were powerless. In early days to the
romantic glamour of the newly discovered Americas, later to the
silence of the frozen seas and to the mysterious depth of
unexplored lands the Cravens had paid a heavy toll. A Craven had
penetrated into the tangled gloom of the Amazon forests, and had