Everard Dominey, for the first twenty-six years of his life, had lived as an ordinary young Englishman of his position,--Eton, Oxford, a few years in the Army, a few years about town, during which he had succeeded in making a still more hopeless muddle of his already encumbered estates: a few months of tragedy, and then a blank.

Afterwards ten years--at first in the cities, then in the dark places of Africa--years of which no man knew anything.

The Everard Dominey of ten years ago had been, without a doubt, good-looking.

The finely shaped features remained, but the eyes had lost their lustre, his figure its elasticity, his mouth its firmness.

He had the look of a man run prematurely to seed, wasted by fevers and dissipation.