the dwarf deer; and over all these people and children and animals, as though shaken down upon them, lay a good-hearted solidarity; and over all these people there also lay a common pride in their Solo ancestors, crowning all their heads with a pale halo of Javanese aristocracy; and the Armenian daughter-in-law and the bucolic Dutch son-in-law were not least proud of this descent. The liveliest of all these elements, which were melting into one another, as it were, through long communal life under the patriarchal roofs, was the youngest son, Adrien de Luce, Addie, in whom the blood of the Solo princess and that of the French adventurer had blended harmoniously. The admixture, it is true, had given him no brains, but it had given him the physical beauty of a young Eurasian, with something of the Moor about it, something southern and seductive, something Spanish, as though in this last child the two alien racial elements had for the first time mingled harmoniously, for the first time been wedded in absolute mutual sympathy; as though in him, this last child after so many children, adventurer and princess had for the first time met in harmony. Addie seemed to possess not a jot of intellect or imagination; he was unable to unite two ideas into one composite thought; he merely felt, with the vague good-nature which had descended upon the whole family. For the rest, he was like a beautiful animal, degenerating in soul and brain, but degenerating into nothing, to a great nullity, to one great emptiness, while his body was like a renewal of his race, full of strength and beauty, while his marrow and his blood and his flesh and his muscles were all one harmony of physical seductiveness, so purely, stupidly, beautifully sensual that its harmony had for a woman an immediate appeal. The lad had but to appear, like a beautiful, southern god, for all the women to look at him and take him into the depths of their imagination, to recall him to their minds again and again; the lad had but to go to a race-ball at Ngadjiwa for all the girls to fall in love with him. He plucked love where he found it, in plenty, in the Patjaram compounds. And everything feminine was in love with him, from his mother to his little nieces. Doddie van Oudijck was infatuated with him. From a child of seven she had been in love, a hundred times and more, with every one who passed before the glance of her flashing pupils, but never yet as with Addie. Her love shone so strongly from her whole being that it was like a flame, that everybody saw it and smiled. The milling-feast had been to her one long delight ... when she danced with him; one long martyrdom ... when he danced with others. He had not asked her to marry him, but she thought of asking him and was prepared to die if he refused. She knew that the resident, her father, would object: he did not like those De Luces, that Solo-French crew, as he called them; but, if Addie was willing, her father would consent, rather than