My mother (looking almost as confused, poor soul! as if she had
become a young girl again) left the whole responsibility of
decision on the shoulders of her son! I was not long in making up
my mind. If she said Yes, she would accept the hand of a man of
worth and honor, who had been throughout his whole life devoted
to her; and she would recover the comfort, the luxury, the social
prosperity and position of which my father's reckless course of
life had deprived her. Add to this, that I liked Mr. Germaine,
and that Mr. Germaine liked me. Under these circumstances, why
should my mother say No? She could produce no satisfactory answer
to that question when I put it. As the necessary consequence, she
became, in due course of time, Mrs. Germaine.

I have only to add that, to the end of her life, my good mother
congratulated he rself (in this case at least) on having taken
her son's advice.

The years went on, and still Mary and I were parted, except in my
dreams. The years went on, until the perilous time which comes in
every man's life came in mine. I reached the age when the
strongest of all the passions seizes on the senses, and asserts
its mastery over mind and body alike.

I had hitherto passively endured the wreck of my earliest and
dearest hopes: I had lived patiently, and lived innocently, for
Mary's sake. Now my patience left me; my innocence was numbered
among the lost things of the past. My days, it is true, were
still devoted to the tasks set me by my tutor; but my nights were
given, in secret, to a reckless profligacy, which (in my present
frame of mind) I look back on with disgust and dismay. I profaned
my remembrances of Mary in the company of women who had reached
the lowest depths of degradation. I impiously said to myself: "I
have hoped for her long enough; I have waited for her long
enough. The one thing now to do is to enjoy my youth and to
forget her."

From the moment when I dropped into this degradation, I might
sometimes think regretfully of Mary--at the morning time, when
penitent thoughts mostly come to us; but I ceased absolutely to
see her in my dreams. We were now, in the completest sense of the
word, parted. Mary's pure spirit could hold no communion with
mine; Mary's pure spirit had left me.

It is needless to say that I failed to keep the secret of my
depravity from the knowledge of my mother. The sight of her grief
was the first influence that sobered me. In some degree at least
I restrained myself: I made the effort to return to purer ways of
life. Mr. Germaine, though I had disappointed him, was too just a
man to give me up as lost. He advised me, as a means of
self-reform, to make my choice of a profession, and to absorb
myself in closer studies than any that I had yet pursued.

I made my peace with this good friend and second father, not only
by following his advice, but by adopting the profession to which
he had been himself attached before he inherited his fortune--the
profession of medicine. Mr. Germaine had been a surgeon: I
resolved on being a surgeon too.

Having entered, at rather an earlier age than usual, on my new
way of life, I may at least say for myself that I worked hard. I
won, and kept, the interest of the professors under whom I
studied. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that my
reformation was, morally speaking, far from being complete. I
worked; but what I did was done selfishly, bitterly, with a hard
heart. In religion and morals I adopted the views of a
materialist companion of my studies--a worn-out man of more than
double my age. I believed in nothing but what I could see, or
taste, or feel. I lost all faith in humanity. With the one
exception of my mother, I had no respect for women. My
remembrances of Mary deteriorated until they became little more
than a lost link of association with the past. I still preserved
the green flag as a matter of habit; but it was no longer kept
about me; it was left undisturbed in a drawer of my writing-desk.
Now and then a wholesome doubt, whether my life was not utterly
unworthy of me, would rise in my mind. But it held no long
possession of my thoughts. Despising others, it was in the
logical order of things that I should follow my conclusions to
their bitter end, and consistently despise myself.

The term of my majority arrived. I was twenty-one years old; and
of the illusions of my youth not a vestige remained.

Neither my mother nor Mr. Germaine could make any positive
complaint of my conduct. But they were both thoroughly uneasy
about me. After anxious consideration, my step-father arrived at
a conclusion. He decided that the one chance of restoring me to
my better and brighter self was to try the stimulant of a life
among new people and new scenes.

At the period of which I am now writing, the home government had
decided on sending a special diplomatic mission to one of the
native princes ruling over a remote province of our Indian
empire. In the disturbed state of the province at that time, the
mission, on its arrival in India, was to be accompanied to the
prince's court by an escort, including the military as well as
the civil servants of the crown. The surgeon appointed to sail
with the expedition from England was an old friend of Mr.
Germaine's, and was in want of an assistant on whose capacity he
could rely. Through my stepfather's interest, the post was


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