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From
disappointment too--who knows? Perhaps he looked forward to that
hammering he was going to give me for rehabilitation, for appeasement?
Who can tell what relief he expected from this chance of a row? He
was naive enough to expect anything; but he had given himself away for
nothing in this case. He had been frank with himself--let alone
with me--in the wild hope of arriving in that way at some effective
refutation, and the stars had been ironically unpropitious. He made an
inarticulate noise in his throat like a man imperfectly stunned by a
blow on the head. It was pitiful.

'I didn't catch up again with him till well outside the gate. I had even
to trot a bit at the last, but when, out of breath at his elbow, I taxed
him with running away, he said, "Never!" and at once turned at bay. I
explained I never meant to say he was running away from _me_. "From no
man--from not a single man on earth," he affirmed with a stubborn mien.
I forbore to point out the one obvious exception which would hold good
for the bravest of us; I thought he would find out by himself very soon.
He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but
I could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on.
I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn't
think of leaving him under a false impression of my--of my--I stammered.
The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish
it, but the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the
logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble seemed to please him. He
cut it short by saying, with courteous placidity that argued an
immense power of self-control or else a wonderful elasticity of
spirits--"Altogether my mistake." I marvelled greatly at this
expression: he might have been alluding to some trifling occurrence.
Hadn't he understood its deplorable meaning? "You may well forgive me,"
he continued, and went on a little moodily, "All these staring people in
court seemed such fools that--that it might have been as I supposed."

'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked at him
curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. "I can't put up
with this kind of thing," he said, very simply, "and I don't mean to. In
court it's different; I've got to stand that--and I can do it too."

'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself
were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog--bits
of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general
aspect of a country. They fed one's curiosity without satisfying it;
they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the whole he was
misleading. That's how I summed him up to myself after he left me late
in the evening. I had been staying at the Malabar House for a few days,
and on my pressing invitation he dined with me there.'



CHAPTER 7


'An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the

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