behind on the tables. The maid, whom the governess and the
pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the door
as usual, but was not admitted. She heard the two voices in dispute
before she knocked, and then being sent away retreated at once--the only
person in the house convinced at that time that there was "something up."

Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there
must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am
telling you of now--an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the green
country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our meeting a
man who has been a blue-water sailor--this evening confabulation is a
dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what we like. I have no
difficulty in imagining that the woman--of forty, and the chief of the
enterprise--must have raged at large. And perhaps the other did not rage
enough. Youth feels deeply it is true, but it has not the same vivid
sense of lost opportunities. It believes in the absolute reality of
time. And then, in that abominable scamp with his youth already soiled,
withered like a plucked flower ready to be flung on some rotting heap of
rubbish, no very genuine feeling about anything could exist--not even
about the hazards of his own unclean existence. A sneering half-laugh
with some such remark as: "We are properly sold and no mistake" would
have been enough to make trouble in that way. And then another sneer,
"Waste time enough over it too," followed perhaps by the bitter retort
from the other party "You seemed to like it well enough though, playing
the fool with that chit of a girl." Something of that sort. Don't you
see it--eh . . . "

Marlow looked at me with his dark penetrating glance. I was struck by
the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion. But we were always
tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed my uncandid thrust.

"You have a ghastly imagination," I said with a cheerfully sceptical
smile.

"Well, and if I have," he returned unabashed. "But let me remind you
that this situation came to me unasked. I am like a puzzle-headed chief-
mate we had once in the dear old _Samarcand_ when I was a youngster. The
fellow went gravely about trying to "account to himself"--his favourite
expression--for a lot of things no one would care to bother one's head
about. He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished practical
seaman. I was