Thus he saw the world and its peoples, and was an honoured guest among the
great ones of the earth. But the hardness of adamant was in him. He had no
beliefs--no ambitions. He dissected everything with all the pitiless
certainty of a surgeon's cold knife. And if his life contained an aim at
all, it was to get through with it and find oblivion in eternal sleep.
Thoughts of his little son would sometimes come to him, but when they did
he thrust them back, and shut his heart up in a casing of ice.
To feel--was to suffer! That perhaps was his only creed; that and a blind,
sullen rage against fate. This was the lesson his suffering had taught him,
and they were weary years before he knew another side.
The first time he saw a tiger in India was one of the landmarks in the
history of his inner emotions. He had gone to shoot the beasts with a
well-known Rajah, and it had chanced he came upon a magnificent creature at
very close quarters and had shot it on sight. But when it lay dead, its
wonderful body gracefully moving no more, a sickening regret came over
Paul. Of all things in creation none reminded him so forcibly of his lost
worshipped Queen. In a flash came back to him the first day she had lain on
the skin which had been his gift. Out of the jungle her eyes seemed to
gleam.
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