[Footnote 1: The Guardian of the Buddhistic hells.]
Leslie could not sleep. This eruption of his past into the present disturbed him deeply.
He had been getting acclimatized, losing little by little that horrible sense of exile and home-sickness that had driven him once across half the world to London, and now it was all coming back.
And she was married to that little beast, and, worst of all, she seemed content.
For eight years he had looked upon her as a thing dead to him, and now she had returned with sevenfold power, for she brought the past with her. The golden past, golden despite that dour father, Colonel Leslie of Glenbruach, that just man unacquainted with folly. She brought the river in spate and the leaping salmon, the heather-scented wind from the purple hills, Glenbruach in the midst of a world of snow, the ripple of the mountain burn and the faint reek of peat.
Worse than all these, she brought herself. She was the same spiritually and mentally as the slim girl of long ago—a slip of a girl straight as a wand and as full of laughter and movement and brightness as a mountain brook.
But materially she had vastly altered. She was now a woman, divinely formed, a creature appealing to every sensual fiber in a man’s nature.
And George du Telle owned all this!
Leslie, I daresay you have perceived, was a man who did not take what one may call a dry-light view of things, past or present, when they had relation to himself; as a matter of fact, he saw the shortcomings of others tremendously clearly. The shortcomings of his father, of Bloomfield the lawyer, of the Sydney bar loafers, of Danjuro the curio dealer, and of poor old sinful, grubbing M’Gourley—too clearly, in fact.
His own shortcomings he acknowledged by word of mouth. He knew they were there, just as a merchant knows a bale of damaged and unsaleable goods is in his cellar, but he did not go down and rake them out and examine them carefully.