"Before that woman? Father, I am a man -I am not afraid. It is my izzat - my honour." Strickland only laughed (to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding-cane that was whipping sufficient for his years. When it was all over, Adam said quietly: "I am little, and you are big. If I stayed among my horse folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there." The merest chance led me to Strickland's house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me, without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen that in the grey of morning when it bent above a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder. "Let me go!" he screamed, and he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. "Let me go!" "Where to, Father Adam?" He was quivering like a new-haltered colt. "To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before women! Let me go!" He tried to bite my hand. "That is a small matter," I said. "Men are horn to beatings." "Thou hast never been beaten," he said savagely. "Indeed I have. Times past counting." "Before women?" "My mother and the ayah saw. By women too, for that matter. What of it?" "What didst thou do?" He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive. "It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is but a jest to be talked of" Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland's eyes when Strickland gave orders. "Ho! Imam Din." The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing to attention. "Hast thou ever been beaten?" said Adam."Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.""Wherefore?" "Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and had said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me, to show that no seeing of the world changed father and son." "And thou?" "I stood up. He was my father." "Good," said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word. Imam Din looked after him. "An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet I am glad I am no father of tuskers," said he. "What is it all?" I asked. "His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!" Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well. "When there was talk of beating I knew that one who sat among horses, such as ours, was not like to kiss his father's hand. So I lay down in this place." We both stood still looking at the well-curb.