114 The Light That Failed about him.” “And when all’s said and done, you will be put aside — quite rightly — for a female girl.” “I wonder... Where do you think he has been today?” “To the sea. Didn’t you see the look in his eyes when he talked about her? He’s as restless as a swallow in autumn.” “Yes; but did he go alone?” “I don’t know, and I don’t care, but he has the beginnings of the go-fever upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There’s no mistaking the signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call upon him now.” “It might be his salvation,” Torpenhow said. “Perhaps — if you care to take the responsibility of being a savior.” Dick returned with the big clasped sketch-book that the Nilghai knew well and did not love too much. In it Dick had drawn all manner of moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the others, of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of the Nilghai’s body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he fell back on fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the Nilghai’s career that were unseemly, — his marriages with many African princesses, his shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army corps to the Mahdi, his tattooment by skilled operators in Burma, his interview (and his fears) with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained executionground of Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit into the bodies of whales, elephants, and toucans. Torpenhow from time to time had added rhymed descriptions, and the whole was a curious piece of art, because Dick decided, having regard to the name of the book which being interpreted means “naked,” that