distinctly
tired, thanks to Douglas Kelly; as a result, there was little said
during the first three courses, except by Mrs. Marlow, who gave her
husband a full account of all her own and the children's doings for that
day, and the names of the people on whom she had called, and of other
visitors whom she had met at their houses. Once or twice she tried to
include Jimmy in the conversation, by asking if he did not remember this
one or that, friends she had known before she was married; but, in every
case, they were merely names to him; they had all been grown up when he
was still at school, and now, after having forgotten their very
existence for ten years, he could not feel the slightest interest in
them.

After a while, Marlow, having taken the edge off his appetite, asked him
a few questions about his wanderings, but paid little heed to his
answers. Even when Jimmy told, in his essentially picturesque way, the
story of John Locke's death, his brother-in-law merely remarked that
such things were never allowed to occur in the British Empire, though,
doubtless, they were to be expected under governments which had injured
the market so greatly in the past by repudiating their bargains. Their
debased silver currency and their worthless paper money were an absolute
scandal, he added.

May, on her part, gave a little gasp when told of the end of Locke's
slayer; then, looking up, and seeing the parlour-maid standing
open-mouthed, with a sauce-boat balanced on a tray at a most dangerous
angle, she felt it was time to intervene.

"Please don't give us any more horrors, Jimmy. We are not used to them
here. Mary," severely, to the parlour-maid, "the master's plate."

Jimmy flushed and said no more; and, apparently, they were perfectly
content that it should be so, for the subject of his travels dropped,
and was not resumed, either then or afterwards. He saw that they were
not interested, even though they were his own people; and he listened in
silence when his sister went back to the apparently inexhaustible
subject of their friends. Certainly, whilst they sat smoking after
dinner, Henry Marlow did ask his guest some more questions, a great
many more in fact, and listened with considerable attention to the
replies; but, as Jimmy noted with a kind of grim amusement, they were
all of an impersonal nature, having reference solely to mining
conditions in South American states. Jimmy's own experiences at the
hands of Dago patri