Major White, who had dropped his single eye-glass a minute earlier, sat
squarely looking out upon the world with a mild surprise. The eye from
which the glass had fallen was even more surprised than the other. But
this, it seemed, was a man upon whom the passing world made, as a rule,
but a passing impression. His attitude towards it was one of dense
tolerance. He was, in fact, one of those men who usually allow their
neighbours to live in a fool's-paradise, based upon the assumption of a
blindness or a stupidity or an indifference, which may or may not be
justified by subsequent events.

This was, as Tony Cornish, his companion, had hinted, _the_ White of
the moment. Just as the reader may be the Jones or the Tomkins of the
moment if his soul thirst for glory. Crime and novel-writing are the
two broad roads to notoriety, but Major White had practiced neither
felony nor fiction. He had merely attended to his own and his country's
business in a solid, common-sense way in one of those obscure and tight
places into which the British officer frequently finds himself forced
by the unwieldiness of the empire or the indiscretion of an
effervescent press.

That he had extricated himself and his command from the tight place,
with much glory to themselves and an increased burden to the cares of
the Colonial Office, was a fact which a grateful country was at this
moment doing its best to recognize. That the authorities and those who
knew him could not explain how he had done it any more than he himself
could, was another fact which troubled him as little. Major White was
wise in that he did not attempt to explain.

"That sort of thing," he said, "generally comes right in the end." And
the affair may thus be consigned to that pigeon-hole of the past in