His brother sat down again before he answered in a constrained voice, “Don’t you think you are rather hard on her, Eustace?” “Hard on her? No, not a bit of it. Of all the worthless women that I know, I think Madeline Croston is the most worthless. Look how she treated you.” “Eustace,” broke in his brother almost sharply, “if you don’t mind, I wish you would not talk of her like that to me. I can’t—in short, I don’t like it.” Sir Eustace’s eyeglass dropped out of Sir Eustace’s eye—he had opened it so wide to stare at his brother. “Why, my dear fellow,” he ejaculated, “you don’t mean to tell me you still care for that woman?” His brother twisted his great form about uncomfortably in the low chair as he answered, “I don’t know, I’m sure, about caring for her, but I don’t like to hear you say such things about her.” Sir Eustace whistled softly. “I am sorry if I offended you, old fellow,” he said. “I had no idea that it was still a sore point with you. You must be a faithful people in South Africa. Here the ‘holy feelings of the heart’ are shorter lived. We wear out several generations of them in twelve years.” CHAPTER III Bottles did not go to bed till late that night. Long after Sir Eustace —who, always careful of his health, never stopped up late if he could avoid it—had vanished, yawning, his brother sat smoking pipe after pipe and thinking. He had sat many times in the same way on a wagon-box in the African veld, or up where the moonlight turned the falls of the Zambesi into a rushing cataract of silver, or alone in his tent when all the camp was sleeping round him. It was a habit of this queer, silent man to sit and think for hours at night, and arose to a great extent from an incapacity to sleep, that was the weak point in his constitution. As for his meditations, they were various, but mostly the outcome of a curious speculative side to his nature, which he never revealed to the outside world. Dreams of a happiness of which heretofore his hard life had given him no glimpse; semi-mystical, religious meditations upon the great unknown around us; and grand schemes for the regeneration of mankind—all formed part of them.