ed, the value of
restrained speech, we should know less of our neighbours' follies and
weaknesses than we do. There was a noticeable absence of interest in
what anyone else had to say. Atkins had his own foible, Fitzgibbon his,
and Hartley, who knew more of the ways of men, a more interesting, but
not less egoistic platform from which he desired to speak. They seemed
to stalk naked and unashamed before the eyes of the one man who never
gave a definite opinion, and who never asserted his own theories or
urged his own philosophy of life.

Coryndon listened because it amused him faintly, but he was glad when
the party broke up and they left. What a planet of words it was, he
thought, as he sat in his room and reflected over the day. Words that
ought to carry value and weight, but were treated like so many loose
pebbles cast into void space; and he wondered as he thought of it; and
from wondering at the wordy, noisy world in which he found himself, he
went on to wonder at the greater silence that was so much more powerful
than words. "The value of mystery," was the phrase that presented itself
to his mind.

During the evening, three men had enjoyed all the pleasure of
self-betrayal, and, from the place where he stood, unable ever to
express anything of his own nature in easy speech, he wondered at them,
with almost childlike astonishment. Fitzgibbon, garrulous and loose of
tongue, Atkins, precise and easily heated to wrath, conscious of some
hidden fear that his dignity was not sufficiently respected, and
Hartley, who had something to say, but who oversaid it, losing grip
because of his very insistence. Not one of them understood the value of
reserve, and all alike strove to proclaim themselves in speech, not
knowing that speech is an unsound vehicle for the unwary, and that
personality disowns it as a medium.

Out of the mouth of a man comes his own condemnation: let him prosper
who remembers this truth. The value of mystery, the value of silence,
and above all things, the supreme value of a tongue that is a servant
and not a master; Coryndon considered these values and wondered again at
the garrulity of men. Talk, the fluid, ineffectual force that fills the
world with noise, that kills illusions and betrays every latent
weakness; surely the high gods laughed when they put a tongue in the
mouth of man. He pinched his lips together and his eyes lighted with a
passing smile of mirth.

"In Burma, there are no clappers to