most common,
or used to be. Humphrey, Bickley is quite right, I am not altogether
as your women are, and I can bring no happiness to any man, or at the
least, to one who cannot wait. Therefore, perhaps you would do well to
think less of me, as I have counselled Bastin and Bickley."

Then again she gazed at me with her wonderful, great eyes, and, shaking
her glittering head a little, smiled and went.

But oh! that smile drew my heart after her.

Chapter XX. Oro and Arbuthnot Travel by Night

As time went on, Oro began to visit me more and more frequently, till at
last scarcely a night went by that he did not appear mysteriously in my
sleeping-place. The odd thing was that neither Bickley nor Bastin seemed
to be aware of these nocturnal calls. Indeed, when I mentioned them on
one or two occasions, they stared at me and said it was strange that he
should have come and gone as they saw nothing of him.

On my speaking again of the matter, Bickley at once turned the
conversation, from which I gathered that he believed me to be suffering
from delusions consequent on my illness, or perhaps to have taken
to dreaming. This was not wonderful since, as I learned afterwards,
Bickley, after he was sure that I was asleep, made a practice of tying
a thread across my doorway and of ascertaining at the dawn that it
remained unbroken. But Oro was not to be caught in that way. I suppose,
as it was impossible for him to pass through the latticework of the open
side of the house, that he undid the thread and fastened it again when
he left; at least, that was Bastin's explanation, or, rather, one of
them. Another was that he crawled beneath it, but this I could not
believe. I am quite certain that during all his prolonged existence Oro
never crawled.

At any rate, he came, or seemed to come, and pumped me--I can use no
other word--most energetically as to existing conditions in the
world, especially those of the civilised countries, their methods of
government, their social state, the physical characteristics of the
various races, their religions, the exact degrees of civilisation that
they had developed, their attainments in art, science and literature,
their martial capacities, their laws, and I know not what besides.

I told him all I could, but did not in the least seem to satisfy his
perennial thirst for information.

"I should prefer to judge for myself," he said at last. "Why are you so
anxious to learn about all these