to look over some business papers till I came."

The idea of the son of the poet, the rescuer of the most forlorn damsel
of modern times, the man of violence, gentleness and generosity, sitting
up to his neck in ship's accounts amused me. "I am sure he would not
have minded," I said, smiling. But the girl's stare was sombre, her
thin white face seemed pathetically careworn.

"I can hardly believe yet," she murmured anxiously.

"It's quite real. Never fear," I said encouragingly, but had to change
my tone at once. "You had better go down that way a little," I directed
her abruptly.

I had seen Fyne come striding out of the hotel door. The intelligent
girl, without staying to ask questions, walked away from me quietly down
one street while I hurried on to meet Fyne coming up the other at his
efficient pedestrian gait. My object was to stop him getting as far as
the corner. He must have been thinking too hard to be aware of his
surroundings. I put myself in his way, and he nearly walked into me.

"Hallo!" I said.

His surprise was extreme. "You here! You don't mean to say you have
been waiting for me?"

I said negligently that I had been detained by unexpected business in
the neighbourhood, and thus happened to catch sight of him coming out.

He stared at me with solemn distraction, obviously thinking of something
else. I suggested that he had better take the next city-ward tram-car.
He was inattentive, and I perceived that he was profoundly perturbed.
As Miss de Barral (she had moved out of sight) could not possibly
approach the hotel door as long as we remained where we were I proposed
that we should wait for the car on the other side of the street. He
obeyed rather the slight touch on his arm than my words, and while we
were crossing the wide roadway in the midst of the lumbering wheeled
traffic, he exclaimed in his deep tone, "I don't know which of these two
is more mad than the other!"

"Really!" I said, pulling him forward from under the noses of two
enormous sleepy-headed cart-horses. He skipped wildly out of the way
and up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind
had nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and
while in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to
relieve his outraged feelings.

"You would never believe! They _are_ mad!"

I took care to place myself in such a position that to face me he had to
turn his back on t