a hush fell at that question, such a hush of genuine awe, that
all of a sudden a wild thought entered my head, a thought strange and
fantastic and terrible. I gripped my host by the wrist and hushed my
voice.

"Are they too exiles?" I asked.

Twice as he looked in my face he gravely nodded his head.

I left that club very swiftly indeed, never to see it again, scarcely
pausing to say farewell to those menial kings, and as I left the door
a great window opened far up at the top of the house and a flash of
lightning streamed from it and killed a dog.

The Three Infernal Jokes

This is the story that the desolate man told to me on the lonely
Highland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stags
roaring.

The saddening twilight, the mountain already black, the dreadful
melancholy of the stags' voices, his friendless mournful face, all
seemed to be of some most sorrowful play staged in that valley by an
outcast god, a lonely play of which the hills were part and he the
only actor.

For long we watched each other drawing out of the solitudes of those
forsaken spaces. Then when we met he spoke.

"I will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter. I will
keep it to myself no longer. But first I must tell you how I came by
it."

I do not give the story in his words with all his woeful interjections
and the misery of his frantic self-reproaches for I would not convey
unnecessarily to my readers that atmosphere of sadness that was about
all he said and that seemed to go with him where-ever he moved.

It seems that he had been a member of a club, a West-end club he
called it, a respectable but quite inferior affair, probably in the
City: agents belonged to it, fire insurance mostly, but life insurance
and motor-agents too, it was in fact a touts' club. It seems that a
few of them one evening, forgetting for a moment their encyclopedias
and non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over a card-table when the
game had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little man
with waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boasting
heartily of his temperance. It was then that he who told this mournful
story, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little over
the green baize into the light of the two guttering candles and
revealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. One
woman was to him as ugly as another.

And the silenced boasters rose and went home to