And Jerry, who had held tight, heaved, since these were reasonable orders. Heaved not an instant too soon, however, for the round black thing was still so close when it changed to a flash, a flame, a roar, that it left Jack Raymond and the child wholly dazed and half blind, all singed and powder-grimed. They were still standing so, bewildered, the man's face and the child's close together disguised by their very griminess into quaint likeness, when Grace Arbuthnot came up to them. 'He isn't hurt,' said Jack Raymond, quickly setting down the child, partly to prove his words, partly because he wished to dissociate himself from the situation as far as possible. The action, however, brought him closer to her eyes, and something in them, something in the faint perfume of heliotrope about her dress, the perfume he remembered so well, made him feel ashamed of his own thought. 'He is really not hurt,' he continued in a low voice for her ear alone. 'And he behaved--as I should have expected your son to behave.' He had not meant to say so much, but something of the old confidence seemed to have returned to him with the old memory; and to her also, for she shook her head and said, almost with a smile-- 'He is not a bit like me--he is far more like you.' She paused, startled at her own unconsidered words, and looked at him with a sudden shrinking in her face. 'Very,' he replied, catching up the boy again. 'We are both black sheep. Come along, my hero, and scrub some of the likeness off.' But, as he carried Jerry away on his shoulder to the dressing-room, he told himself that she was right. The boy _was_ like him. Now that it had been suggested to him, he saw it clearly. Not in face, but in the nameless ways which show a likeness in the inward stuff that has gone, possibly, to make up a very dissimilar outside. The explanation was simple, of course. It was a case of reversion. He himself had always been counted a typical Raymond, and Jerry, through his mother, had harked back to that distant, almost-forgotten ancestor. Something had made the current set that way once more; that was all. But what something? Was it possible that the mind had this power as well as the body? He swung the child to the attendant grimly, and bade him wash the _chola sahib's_ face, and be sure to take off all the black. That likeness, at any rate, need not remain. The other left him curiously helpless, curiously ashamed. CHAPTER VIII THE TEMPLE OF VISESHWAR Chris had followed his wife into the supper-room with the vague hope of feeling that he had a place somewhere, that he belonged to something, even to her. He had found her surrounded by strangers, and evidently forgetful of his very existence.