hypocrites who made it their business to break Major Meredith because he was an Imperialist." Again the reporter put in the word "Disturbance," but he apparently managed to catch the next sentence. "Aye, you may yap," the old administrator went on, "and I dare say from the snug looks of some of you you're own sons of the men who did it, and I hope you feel the weight of their bloodguiltiness. Two hundred thousand lives, gentlemen, and all thrown away to pander to the fads of some ignorant theorists who had never been beyond the shores of England. If Major Meredith could have held out against the clamor, I believe that he would have been a man to stand beside Clive, and Rhodes, and Hastings, in the work he would have done for the Empire; but as it was he left the service in disgust, and drifted away into the savage depths of that Africa he knew so well, and had so vainly tried to help. His wife went with him, and, so I heard, bore him a daughter before she died. A rumor reached me that some trader brought the child to England and adopted her, but poor Meredith--well, he has disappeared from the record...." The lecture closed, a few paragraphs farther on, again with "Disturbance." Kate folded the sheets and put them on the table. She was somehow conscious of a queer thrill of elation. One of the discomforts that an adopted child who does not know her history must always carry through life, is the feeling of having been bred of parents that were probably discreditable. She had vague memories of her babyhood. There was a village of thatched houses and shade trees. She had clear recollection of one day playing in the dust with the village dogs and the other babies--black babies, they were--when a huge spotted beast sprang amongst them, roared, and for a moment stood over her, the white baby. At intervals she had dreamed of that beast ever since. From maturer knowledge she knew it must have been a leopard, and leopards do not grow beyond a certain normal size. But in dreamland that leopard was always enormous.... She could never remember whether in the dusty village street under the heat and the sunshine it had done damage, or whether the pariah dogs had frightened it away. Try how she would, she could remember no mother. The women of the village were all black, and she lived, so faint memory said, first with one and then with another. She had no clear recollection of any of them.... And, indeed, there might have been many villages, because there were hammock journeys, with a pet monkey riding on the pole, and walls of thick green bush on either hand that held dangers.... She still had a scar just below the nail on the first finger of her right hand where the monkey bit her one day when she teased it.