himself with Asiatics as against white folk, to be ranging himself on the side of the lesser breed-partly because the memory of his interview with the little Princess set him wincing whenever he recalled it to mind. The incident had left behind it an impression as of some thing shameful, something upon which he must not suffer his thoughts to dwell, if the old serene and peaceful happiness and contentment with his lot were to be lured back again. Therefore it was with something of a shock that he heard the name of Baram Singh spoken one day at the Fairfax table.

"I see the Baram Singhs are still knocking about," Harry Fairfax remarked suddenly.

"Oh yes," said Sibyl. "Princess Marie played hockey with us all this winter.

She is a beautiful half-back."

"I remember her playing when I was at home at Christmas," said Harry. "She played an uncommonly good game, but she struck me as being a trifle vicious with her stick. I have a dent in my shin-bone the depth of a walnut-shell to remember her by."

"She dances beautifully," said Alice. "I remember that too, and, by the way, Fred Castle was awfully gone on her. Did it ever come to anything?"

"No," said Sibyl; "but I think his people were rather glad to get him away. He went out to India to join his regiment in March."

"Ah!" said Harry ruminatingly, "that will cure him."

"But her brother, Prince Alexander, has been married since you were here."

"Yes, of course. Wasn't there a great row about it?"

"Dreadful. Her people were furious: they did everything they could to prevent it," said Sibyl, with the eager interest which so many display only when discussing the misfortunes of their friends.

"I suppose she thought it smart to

be 'Princess Anything,' in spite of all drawbacks," suggested Harry.

"Yes, I suppose so," assented Sibyl; "but she has not got much out of it. Lots of people give her the cold shoulder, and I believe that she is not particularly bien vue even at Court."

"Serve her right!" said Harry.

"Oh, how could she!" ejaculated Alice, who so far had been listening in silence. "She must have been a horrid girl!"

She gave a little shudder, and then suddenly, as her eyes lighted upon Saleh's attentive face, her delicate skin was dyed to her very forehead with a burning blush,

"Keep off the grass!" said Harry, and then he and Sibyl laughed, while Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax looked embarrassed, and Saleh glanced from one to the other in utter perplexity.

The words of the conversation were in themselves familiar, yet the meaning which they seemed to have conveyed to the rest of the party was something which Saleh felt that he had caught imperfectly. What concern of his could the family affairs of the Baram Singhs be supposed to be? Yet he was dimly aware that Alice's evident embarrassment had been caused by his presence, and the fact, which to him lacked all reason, was distressing. Once again he felt himself to be an alien: once more he was filled with anger against the little Princess, who seemed fated to bring upon him unmerited humiliation.

The memory of this trifling incident was soon effaced, however, by the unusual graciousness with which Alice treated him during the afternoon that followed. She was enthusiastic in her praise of his play at lawn-tennis, and repeatedly chose him as her partner. Later, when they went on the river after tea, she said kind things about his handling of his oar, and pointedly invited him to share her seat in the

cied that she had hurt his feelings, and was determined to make amends; but Saleh, who was conscious of no grievance against her, and consequently was expectant of no reparation, saw in her overtures only the natural expression of her personal liking for himself. Her approval and her graciousness warmed him with a glow which that of the Le Mesurier girls had never had the power to kindle. His proximity to her thrilled him, as he sat beside her, in a fashion that was new and wholly delightful, nor did it occur to him that her advances were somewhat more frank and open than such courtesies are apt to be between a girl and a man with whom she feels herself to be upon a footing of perfect equality. Alice, Saleh's nationality and color made him to all intents and purposes sexless. In her estimation he was not a man, like other marriageable men, and she accordingly admitted him behind that barrier of reserve which is the girl's natural intrenchment against the aggression of the male besieger.

To

Therefore, as the boat lolled down the Thames that evening through the fragrant summer gloaming, Alice went out of her way to be "nice" to Saleh, her desire to allay the pain of a wound thoughtlessly inflicted leading her, though she had no inkling of it, to work him a far more lasting injury.

X.

Thenceforth Saleh marvelled at the folly which had driven him to ramble alone in Richmond Park, and at the prodigality with which he had SO wantonly wasted precious hours that might have been spent in Alice's company. Пis one desire now was to be near the girl, to watch the play of her dainty features, the grace of her every movement, to listen to her, to feel the thrill that shot through him when she spoke to him or smiled upon him. The

remaining members of the Fairfax family had sunk in his estimation to the atter insignificance of shadows. They were to him of no sort of account, save as happy satellites that revolved around his star. For him a room was empty till Alice chanced to enter it; a game or a jaunt was unspeakably stupid and wearisome if she took no part in it; and Harry Fairfax cursed Saleh's "slackness" hourly, since the latter shirked every amsuement that might take him away from the society of the girl.

Mr. Fairfax and his wife had never passed beyond the stage of being unable to see anything in the world except each other's faces, so they were quite blind to what was happening. The young people of the household were not less obtuse. They liked their guest, and noted with a certain surprise how very like an English lad he was; but their attitude towards him resembled that of the great Dr. Johnson with regard to the pig. They were not greatly concerned with the excellence of his swinish caligraphy, all their admiration being claimed by the marvel that a pig should write at all. They rather enjoyed showing Saleh off to their friends, but they never dreamed of looking upon him as a human being susceptible to all the emotions of humanity. His racial inferiority was something so completely beyond the range of dispute that it passed into their acceptance as an axiom. It was so patent a fact that it called for no demonstration. It was a point upon which they were unshakably convinced. If Alice had been accused of flirting with Saleh, she would have resented the charge as a degrading insult, and her brother and sister would have felt themselves to be no less outraged through her; but the bare possibility of such an interpretation being put upon her kindness to the lad never so much as crossed the girl's mind. It would have seemed to her too gro

tesque, too absurd. Her whole conception of their relative positions would have had to be revolutionized before such a suspicion could even find an entry into her mind, for her very graciousness to Saleh was but an expression of the pity with which his inferiority inspired her.

Also, I think, Saleh's hairless, boyish -face, which made him look to unaccustomed English eyes so much younger than his years, did him here a sorry service, for to Alice he seemed little more than a child, and it was as a child rendered piteous by irremediable deformity that she petted and flattered him. Yet Saleh, for all his apparent youth and his bare nineteen years of age, was a man full-grown. In his own country he would have entered upon the estate of the husband and the father before he was fifteen, and though the climate of England had done something towards checking his precocious development, he was now far more mature than are the majority of European lads six years his senior. Also the blood running in his veins was hot from a race which since the beginning of things has paired and mated almost in childhood, a race which holds with the primitive Adam that "it is not good for man to live alone." Circumstances, so far, had saved him from the divine obsession of love; but now in the daily companionship of Alice Fairfax the passion which his people name "the madness" came upon him in all its grandeur and its might. And the pity of it was that this was no mere calflove, such as an English lad might have felt, nor yet the crude animal craving of man for woman which passes for love with the men of Saleh's blood and is called among them by too holy a name. For here the curse of his five years' training among English folk fell heavily. The spiritual side of the lad's nature had been developed by insensible degrees, giving him a higher range

of aspirations, a greater acuteness and delicacy of feeling, and far more power of appreciation and delight than were his by right of inheritance; but endowing him also with a capacity for suffering infinitely enhanced.

Primitive men are denied many joys which may be tasted only by their highly civilized and cultured brethren. Their desires are few, and of a kind easy to satisfy. They are never thrilled and exalted by the dreams of a lofty ambition; but the most bitter of disappointed hopes means for them nothing much more difficult of endurance than a hunger-pang-a memory which the next full meal will triumphantly efface. Inasmuch as they are nearer to the beasts, in so much are they spared the deeper agonies of man; for, just as the little mermaid in the German story could put on the likeness of a woman only at the cost of feeling the knife-blades eat into the feet with which she trod the earth, so each painful step which humanity has taken upon its upward path has made it more and more vulnerable through its increased sensitiveness, its finer perceptions. And Saleh, born and bred a primitive, but lifted through the caprice of the white men out of his native conditions, found himself, now on the threshold of manhood, possessed of a refinement of taste and a yearning after higher things such as his teachers had been at no small pains to instil. They had given him all they might, but one thing they could not give-the equal chance with others to satisfy the aspiration they had inspired.

Left to himself, he would have loved many brown girls, after the fashion of his people, with a rough passion that made no demand upon his intellect and asked no contribution from the stunted soul of him; but transplanted as he had been from his natural environment, and forced to a development foreign to his circumstances, he loved Alice Fair

fax with all the fire of his Malayan temperament, but also with the reverence, the purity, the idealism of a European lover. And here again his utter denationalization smote him shrewdly; for since the devout lover must ever think meanly of himself when he raises his eyes to the object of his adoration, Saleh presently began to torture himself with doubts and questions.

For some flawless days he had lived in a fool's paradise, knowing only that he was happy, and dreaming not as yet that it was love which of a sudden had made the world so good a place in which to live. Then a chance word of Harry Fairfax had forced upon him a realization of the truth. "When you girls are married and settled down," Harry had said with casual, brotherly indifference, speaking of some plan of his own, and immediately Saleh had understood that the bare notion of Alice becoming the wife of any man was a thing he could not endure to contemplate. He asked for nothing for himself. He would be content just to watch and love and serve her; but she must be Alice Fairfax, not the wife of some other man. In a moment it flashed upon him how bitter it would be "to look at happiness through another man's eyes," and to that thought succeeded a kind of cold despair, for the humility of a reverent lover at last brought into focus the elusive vision of himself as a being innately inferior, giving instantly a new meaning to the hints and suspicions which of late had been haunting him.

Yet still he struggled manfully with his conviction. He was eager to admit the supreme beauty and worth of his deity, he was content to prostrate himself in spirit before her, confessing that no man in all the world could be deserving of her love. This, he thought, must be the creed of any man who Blackwood's Magazine.

He

dared to love her; but he fought with himself desperately to prevent the truth from forcing him farther than that admission implied. He tried to shut his eyes to the gulf that divides the white men from the brown, strove strenuously to persuade himself that though all men were unworthy of her, he was not the most unworthy of all, and then the insolent words of the little Princess came back to him, mocking his grief. "You black boy," she had called him, and the memory of the words set him wincing anew. was not black, he told himself,-not black like a Habshi. (He still preserved sufficient of his Malayan prejudices to feel the deepest contempt for an African negro.) He was dark, of course, but hardly more swarthy than were many of the people he had seen at Naples on his voyage to England; yet he knew now that it was this very matter of his color which had been troubling him ever since he first came to stay at Richmond. For a day or two after he had made the discovery that he loved Alice, the emotions that rent him affected him so deeply that his friends feared that he was ill, and Alice, more pitiful of him than ever, was doubly kind and gracious. Then the facile optimism of the ease-loving Malay came to his aid, and seeing how good the girl was to him, he speedily persuaded himself that he had been frightened by shadows. Something of his former self-content returned to him; an echo of the belief, held so firmly by the natural Malay, that his race represents humanity in its highest expression, came to him, bringing him some measure of comfort in spite of its want of logic; he comported himself with his old proud independence, and though now and again reaction plunged him in despair, at other times his hopes ran high, and even the impossible seemed easy of achievement.

The homing instinct-the instinct for making a home, keeping it, taking a pride in it, loving it, returning to it from the ends of the earth-was once a characteristic of the Briton. It was an instinct born in him and fostered by education, environment, and tradition. It may be, and possibly is, still born in him, but it is overlaid in its infancy by the conditions of life in this century. In the man this instinct is. though it be said with fear and trembling, dying harder than in the really modern woman. The educated, athletic, healthy woman of to-day has cultivated such a holy horror of becoming purely domestic, of the "tabby cat" order, and, moreover, has so many interests, wholesome and unwholesome, outside her home, that she has less use for the fireside than the man of her owu class; especially as that fireside is associated for her with the daily round, the common task. The corresponding man is "something" in or out of the City, or is at the ends of the earth ou duty or pleasure, but the vision of home remains to him a reality to which it would be pleasant and restful to return. It is one of the injustices of this age that it is taking away from the male, boy or man, the vision of home.

In these days the very rich have no homes, they have "places"; and the middle classes in London will soon have no homes; they will have flats. A flat is specially constructed for getting away from. It is an excellent jumping-off place.

It is impossible to split the essentials to home-making into component and labelled parts. Each man has in his own mind's eye a vision of what home was. or might be, or is. But it is impossible to believe that in any of these pri vate visions home is in a block of mod. ern flats with a common staircase, a

common lift, and an absence of that privacy which our forefathers cultivated.

Unfortunately, from various causes--ground landlords and a desire to shirk responsibility-London is becoming a city of flat dwellers. It is not only that the æsthetic sense is offended by the huge, ugly, modern commonplace barrack, it is not only beauty that is lost, but possibilities, to the individual and the nation. In proportion as flat life increases home life decreases. The flat dweller ought not to keep a dog, prefers not to keep a cat, cannot have a garden, has no chance of keeping house, has no possible place for memories, and, most emphatically of all. has no use or accommodation for babies. Although it may be possible to make homes without kittens, or babies. or flowers, or memories, or cupboards, the spirit of home is hard to woo and win without any of them.

A

The very genius of the flat is that it shall be easy to leave; and, let us be just to the flat, it is very easy to leave. As one of the ambitions of this age is always to be getting away from somewhere as quickly as possible, it is a point scored to the flat that it lends itself so readily to this new philosophy of life, which is summed up in the expressive American verb-to hustle. certain proportion of flat dwellers are the lonely of either sex, men and women to whom the unknown neigh bor above and below and around is to be desired as providing an attenuated sense of human companionship. These have a moral right to a flat if they like it. The flat, also, is useful to, and justifiable for, those who are only wanting a halting-place between one home and another. As tents in the desert flats are excellent. It is as homes they are failures.