"Yes!" continued the Major, after a pause, "I'll have to tell my tale like the Ancient Mariner; and if in so doing I bore you with a few uninteresting confidences about myself, I can't help it. You shall have as little of them as possible." He was so long settling himself in a chair, pulling up his trousers in his careful, economical way, and poking the fire, that our attention had begun to waver, when his opening words startled us into renewed curiosity. "I don't suppose," he began, "that any of you know I am a widower; but I am. My wife died a year after our marriage; and the child too--a girl. If you search the whole wide world through you won't find a more desolate creature than a boy of two-and-twenty coming back alone in a strange country from the grave of his wife and child. Perhaps, as Rudyard Kipling says, he has no business to have a wife and child. Anyhow he feels a mistake somewhere in the universe when he tries to behave like a man in the little drawing-room she made so pretty. The twopenny-halfpenny fans put up to hide the bare walls--the little dodges to make the sticks of furniture look nice which seemed to you so clever, and over which you have both laughed so often--the unused basket thing done up with lace and frills over which she was so happy that last evening, while you sate by wondering if it could be true, and that your child would lie amongst the dainty furbelows. Well! I suppose it has to be sometimes, but it drove me mad. I was like the boy in another of Kipling's tales, and could think of nothing but death to end it all; just to creep away and die by myself somewhere. I did not want so much to be dead, but to be quite alone--by myself. You see I had lost everything--for ever--and the rest of the stupid world drove me wild with impatience. "So I went out on leave to the old Salt Road, which ran right across the loneliest part of the district. Perhaps some of you don't know what a Salt Road is? Simply the Customs line which in old days used to be patrolled day and night in order to prevent smuggling. The cactus hedge had been cut down when the protection system was given up, but the road behind it was still passable, and the patrol houses, more or less dilapidated, stood at intervals of ten or twelve miles. I had seen some of them when out on shooting expeditions, and the remembrance of their desolation came back on me now with a new sort of fascination.