pid talk of the railway carriage held us to
Amiens, and after. During the second half of the long journey Roderick
was asleep, and Mary's pretty head had fallen against the cushion as
the swing of the carriage gave the direct negative to her words at
Calais station. At last, even the maker of commonplaces was silent; and
as I reclined at greater length on the cushions of the stuffy
compartment, I thought how strange a company we were then being carried
over the dull, drear pasture-land of France, to the lights, the music,
and the life of the great capital. Of the man Martin Hall--I remembered
his true name in the moments of repose--I knew nothing beyond that
which I have told you; but of my friends Roderick and Mary,
accompanying me on this wildaway journey, I knew all that was to be
known. Roderick and I had been at Caius College, Cambridge, together,
friends drawn the closer in affection because our conditions in kith
and kin, in possession and in purpose, in ambition and in idleness,
were so very like. Roderick was an orphan twenty-four years of age,
young, rich, desiring to know life before he measured strength with
her, caring for no man, not vital enough to realise danger, an
Englishman in tenacity of will, a good fellow, a gentleman. His sister
was his only care. He gave to her the strength of an undivided love,
and just as, in the shallowness of much of his life, there was matter
for blame, so in this increasing affection and thought for the one very
dear to him was there the strength of a strong manhood and a noble
work.

For myself, I was twenty-five when the strange things of which I am
about to write happened to me. Like Roderick, I was an orphan. My
father had left me L50,000, which I drew upon when I was of age; but,
shame that I should write it, I had spent more than L40,000 in four
years, and my schooner, the _Celsis_, with some few thousand pounds,
alone remained to me. Of what was my future to be, I knew not. In the
senseless purpose of my life, I said only, "It will come, the tide in
my affairs which taken at the flood should lead on to fortune." And in
this supreme folly I lived the days, now in the Mediterranean, now
cruising round the coast of England, now flying of a sudden to Paris
with one they might have called a vulgarian, but one I chose to know. A
journey fraught with folly, the child of folly, to end in folly, so
might it have been said; but who can foretell the supreme moments of
our live