"
III
Bottles did not go to bed till late that night. Long after Sir Eustace
--who, always careful of his health, never stopped up late if he could
avoid it--had vanished, yawning, his brother sat smoking pipe after pipe
and thinking. He had sat many times in the same way on a wagon-box in
the African veld, or up where the moonlight turned the falls of the
Zambesi into a rushing cataract of silver, or alone in his tent when all
the camp was sleeping round him. It was a habit of this queer, silent
man to sit and think for hours at night, and arose to a great
extent from an incapacity to sleep, that was the weak point in his
constitution.
As for his meditations, they were various, but mostly the outcome of a
curious speculative side to his nature, which he never revealed to the
outside world. Dreams of a happiness of which heretofore his hard life
had given him no glimpse; semi-mystical, religious meditations upon
the great unknown around us; and grand schemes for the regeneration of
mankind--all formed part of them.
But there was one central thought, the fixed star of his mind, round
which all the others continually revolved, taking their light and colour
from it, and that was the thought of Madeline Croston, the woman to whom
he had been engaged.
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