374 WITH KITCHENER IN THE SOUDAN Soudan. My pay sufficed for my wants there, and I drew out the remaining four hundred and fifty pounds when I left Cairo, so I am amply provided.”

Gregory remained four days in London, obtaining suitable clothes; then, attended by Zaki, he took his place in the Great Western for Tavistock. Zaki had already picked up a good deal of English, and Gregory talked to him only in that language on their way down from the battle-field, so that he could now express himself in simple phrases. Mr. Tufton had on the previous day written, at Gregory’s request, to his aunts, saying that the son of their brother had called upon him and given him proofs, which he considered incontestable, of his identity and of the death of his father. He was the bearer of a letter from his father to them, and proposed delivering it the next day in person. He agreed with Gregory that it was advisable to send down this letter, as otherwise the ladies might doubt whether he was really what he claimed to be, as his father’s letter might very well have come into the hands of a third person.

He went down by the night-mail to Tavistock, put up at an hotel, and after breakfast drove over to the Manor House, and sent in a card which he had had printed in town. He was shown into a room where the two ladies were waiting for him. They had been some four or five years younger than his father, a fact of which he was not aware, and instead of being elderly women, as he expected, he found by their appearance they were scarcely entering middle age. They were evidently much agitated.

I have come down without waiting for an invitation,” he Jaid. “I was anxious to deliver my father’s letter to you, or at least a copy of it, as soon as possible. It was written before his death, some eighteen years ago, and was intended for my mother to give to you should she return to England.

Its interest to you consists chiefly in the proof of my father’s affection for you, and that he felt he could rely on yours for him. I may say that this is a copy, signed as correct by Mr.