The act of a fool perhaps. But has not one who knew called him the Fool of Genius? Anyhow he had the courage and the wit to cut his life off clean. The life of John Baltazar of Cambridge and that of James Burden who, having landed at Shanghai, spent so many adventurous years in the heart of China, might have been lived by two individuals who had never heard of each other. That disappearance from England was the first start, the consequence of the first violent fit. The first that mattered. But there had been others. To one, his mind went back even as he asked himself whether his confession to Quong Ho had been the proceeding of an idiot. It had to do with the selfsame subject of that confession. The period went back to his last undergraduate term, when he was as certain of being Senior Wrangler as a Cardinal of being the best theologian in a scratch company of parish priests. Carrying on to the beginning of term an end of vacation revel, Baltazar took to evil courses. The slander which, reported to young Godfrey Baltazar, Marcelle Baring had so vehemently denied, had its basis in truth. He had discovered alcohol, and for a time plunged, with his whole-souled fervour, into his discovery. Then, one Spooner, the next in the Tripos running, a man living entirely on his scholarships, a mild and pallid man of no physical value whom the lusty Baltazar, after the way of vivid and immature young men, despised, had the grand audacity to call on him and expostulate with him on his excesses. Baltazar listened breathless. The fellow ought to be going round with a show of freaks. He told him so. Spooner waved aside the proposition and went on with his main argument. “You have every right to be Senior. There’s not one of us in it with you. But if you go on playing the fool like this, anything may happen.” “That’s all to your personal advantage, my dear good missionary,” said Baltazar. “You don’t seem to understand why I’ve come here,” replied Spooner. “I don’t want to be Senior just because a man who’s infinitely better than I is a drunken sot.” And they talked and bandied words a little, and then Baltazar saw himself face to face with an exquisite soul. He gripped the lean shoulders of the undeveloped, spectacled young man with his big hands. “I swear to God,” said he, “that I’ll not touch a drop of alcohol for the next five years.” But he also swore to himself an oath of which Spooner was ignorant. He swore that Spooner should be Senior. And he kept both vows. In the last day’s Problem Paper he deliberately sacrificed himself. As a matter of fact he just overdid it, for, to the mystification of all concerned in the Tripos, he was placed third. But Spooner had the coveted distinction. The Tripos over, everything fell before Baltazar, and he was acknowledged the supreme mathematician of his year, and, in the course of time, the greatest of his generation. * * * * *