meditatively at his pipe.

“What was the great-great-uncle doing up there, John?” I asked.

“He was a bit of a rolling stone, rather like me, I fancy. He started with a commission in the East India Company’s army, got tired of it, went north, and joined the Sikh army. Then he dropped that and took to wandering. Went up into Kashmir. Thence he conceived the idea of following the old trade route into China. His library apparently consisted of Marco Polo.

“Three years later he turned up again in Ferozepur, where my great-grandfather, his brother, was commanding a regiment, and announced his intention of fitting out and going off again to Central Asia. But before he could start again he went out with cholera. However, before he died he gave my great-grandfather a diary and a bundle of old papers, and said that, if ever any other member of the family got the wanderlust, the papers were to be given to him.

[12]“My great-grandfather, who was married, had no particular desire to travel, and, I fancy, after reading through the stuff, he locked it up and dismissed the whole lot as a traveller’s yarn, due to overmuch Marco Polo combined with fever.

[12]

“My grandfather and my father were stay-at-homes, and I’m the first of the family to come back here. I brought with me the old papers and the diary that was with them more as idle curiosities—happened to notice them when I was on leave before coming back from France to Mespot in 1916.

“Having nothing much to do, I read them through on board ship, and after that I read them fairly often, until I know bits, I think, by heart.

“A lot of them are mere scrappy notes about his journeys, rough drawings of places and types, and it’s only after he struck east from Urumchi that the real interest comes into the diary. Pass me over that box, will you?”

Forsyth reached the box across to Wrexham, who undid it, and took out a small shabby leather-covered notebook.

“I’m going to read you something,” he said, “that will tell you why I went north. As I said before, once is nothing, twice is a coincidence, three times is a moral cert. This is the ‘once’; part of the ‘twice’ you’ve both seen in the shape of that coin; the ‘three times’ I’ve got here, and will show you presently.”

He put the box on the table by 

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