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"So is Harry Feversham."

Sutch stared at his visitor. For a moment he did not understand, the shock had been too sudden and abrupt. Then after comprehension dawned upon him, he refused to believe. The folly of that refusal in its turn became apparent. He sat down in his chair opposite to Durrance, awed into silence. And the silence lasted for a long while.

"What am I to do?" he said at length.

"I have thought it out," returned Durrance. "You must go to Suakin. I will give you a letter to Willoughby, who is Deputy-Governor, and another to a Greek merchant there whom I know, and on whom you can draw for as much money as you require."

"That's good of you, Durrance, upon my word," Sutch interrupted; and forgetting that he was talking to a blind man he held out his hand across the table. "I would not take a penny if I could help it; but I am a poor man. Upon my soul it's good of you."

"Just listen to me, please," said Durrance. He could not see the outstretched hand, but his voice showed that he would hardly have taken it if he had. He was striking the final blow at his chance of happiness. But he did not wish to be thanked for it. "At Suakin you must take the Greek merchant's advice and organise a rescue as best you can. It will be a long business, and you will have many disappointments before you succeed. But you must stick to it until you do."

Upon that the two men fell to a discussion of the details of the length of time which it would take for a message from Suakin to be carried into Omdurman, of the untrustworthiness of some Arab spies, and of the risks which the trustworthy ran. Sutch's house was searched for maps, the various routes by which the prisoners might escape were described by Durrance--the great forty days' road from Kordofan on the west, the straight track from Omdurman to Berber and from Berber to Suakin, and the desert journey across the Belly of Stones by the wells of Murat to Korosko. It was late before Durrance had told all that he thought necessary and Sutch had exhausted his questions.

"You will stay at Suakin as your base of operations," said Durrance, as he closed up the maps.

"Yes," answered Sutch, and he rose from his chair. "I will start as soon as you give me the letters."

"I have them already written."

"Then I will start to-morrow. You may be sure I will let both you and Miss Eustace know how the attempt progresses."

"Let me know," said Durrance, "but not a whisper of it to Ethne. She knows nothing of my plan, and she must know nothing until Feversham comes back himself. She has her point of view, as I have mine. Two lives shall not be spoilt because of her. That's her resolve. She believes that to some degree she was herself the cause of Harry Feversham's disgrace--that but for her he would not have resigned his commission."

"Yes."

"You agree with that? At all events she believes it. So there's one life spoilt because of her. Suppose now I go to her and say: 'I know that you pretend out of your charity and kindness to care for me, but in your heart you are no more than my friend,' why, I hurt her, and cruelly. For there's all that's left of the second life spoilt too. But bring back Feversham! Then I can speak--then I can say freely: 'Since you are just my friend, I would rather be your friend and nothing more. So neither life will be spoilt at all.'"

"I understand," said Sutch. "It's the way a man should speak. So till Feversham comes back the pretence remains. She pretends to care for you, you pretend you do not know she thinks of Harry. While I go eastwards to bring him home, you go back to her."

"No," said Durrance, "I can't go back. The strain of keeping up the pretence was telling too much on both of us. I go to Wiesbaden. An oculist lives there who serves me for an excuse. I shall wait at Wiesbaden until you bring Harry home."

Sutch opened the door, and the two men went out into the hall. The servants had long since gone to bed. A couple of candlesticks stood upon a table beside a lamp. More than once Lieutenant Sutch had forgotten that his visitor was blind, and he forgot the fact again. He lighted both candles and held out one to his companion. Durrance knew from the noise of Sutch's movements what he was doing.

"I have no need of a candle," he said with a smile. The light fell full upon his face, and Sutch suddenly remarked how tired it looked and old. There were deep lines from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth, and furrows in the cheeks. His hair was grey as an old man's hair. Durrance had himself made so little of his misfortune this evening that Sutch had rather come to rate it as a small thing in the sum of human calamities, but he read his mistake now in Durrance's face. Just above the flame of the candle, framed in the darkness of the hall, it showed white and drawn and haggard--the face of an old worn man set upon the stalwart shoulders of a man in the prime of his years.

"I have said very little to you in the way of sympathy," said Sutch. "I did not know that you would welcome it. But I am sorry. I am very sorry."

"Thanks," said Durrance, simply. He stood for a moment or two silently in front of his host. "When I was in the Soudan, travelling through the deserts, I used to pass the white skeletons of camels lying by the side of the track. Do you know the camel's way? He is an unfriendly, graceless beast, but he marches to within an hour of his death. He drops and dies with the load upon his back. It seemed to me, even in those days, the right and enviable way to finish. You can imagine how I must envy them that advantage of theirs now. Good night."

He felt for the bannister and walked up the stairs to his room.

CHAPTER XXVI

GENERAL FEVERSHAM'S PORTRAITS ARE APPEASED

Lieutenant Sutch, though he went late to bed, was early astir in the morning. He roused the household, packed and repacked his clothes, and made such a bustle and confusion that everything to be done took twice its ordinary time in the doing. There never had been so much noise and flurry in the house during all the thirty years of Lieutenant Sutch's residence. His servants could not satisfy him, however quickly they scuttled about the passages in search of this or that forgotten article of his old travelling outfit. Sutch, indeed, was in a boyish fever of excitement. It was not to be wondered at, perhaps. For thirty years he had lived inactive--on the world's half-pay list, to quote his own phrase; and at the end of all that long time, miraculously, something had fallen to him to do--something important, something which needed energy and tact and decision. Lieutenant Sutch, in a word, was to be employed again. He was feverish to begin his employment. He dreaded the short interval before he could begin, lest some hindrance should unexpectedly occur and relegate him again to inactivity.

"I shall be ready this afternoon," he said briskly to Durrance as they breakfasted. "I shall catch the night mail to the Continent. We might go up to London together; for London is on your way to Wiesbaden."

"No," said Durrance, "I have just one more visit to pay in England. I did not think of it until I was in bed last night. You put it into my head."

"Oh," observed Sutch, "and whom do you propose to visit?"

"General Feversham," replied Durrance.

Sutch laid down his knife and fork and looked with surprise at his companion. "Why in the world do you wish to see him?" he asked.

"I want to tell him how Harry has redeemed his honour, how he is still redeeming it. You said last night that you were bound by a promise not to tell him anything of his son's intention, or even of his son's success until the son returned himself. But I am bound by no promise. I think such a promise bears hardly on the general. There is nothing in the world which could pain him so much as the proof that his son was a coward. Harry might have robbed and murdered. The old man would have preferred him to have committed both these crimes. I shall cross into Surrey this morning and tell him that Harry never was a coward."

Sutch shook his head.

"He will not be able to understand. He will be very grateful to you, of course. He will be very glad that Harry has atoned his disgrace, but he will never understand why he incurred it. And, after all, he will only be glad because the family honour is restored."

"I don't agree," said Durrance. "I believe the old man is rather fond of his son, though to be sure he would never admit it. I rather like General Feversham."

Lieutenant Sutch had seen very little of General Feversham during the last five years. He could not forgive him for his share in the responsibility of Harry Feversham's ruin. Had the general been capable of sympathy with and comprehension of the boy's nature, the white feathers would never have been sent to Ramelton. Sutch pictured the old man sitting sternly on his terrace at Broad Place, quite unaware that he was himself at all to blame, and on the contrary, rather inclined to pose as a martyr, in that his son had turned out a shame and disgrace to all the dead Fevershams whose portraits hung darkly on the high walls of the hall. Sutch felt that he could never endure to talk patiently with General Feversham, and he was sure that no argument would turn that stubborn man from his convictions. He had not troubled at all to consider whether the news which Durrance had brought should be handed on to Broad Place.

"You are very thoughtful for others," he said to Durrance.

"It's not to my credit. I practise thoughtfulness for others out of an instinct of self-preservation, that's all," said Durrance. "Selfishness is the natural and encroaching fault of the blind. I know that, so I am careful to guard against it."

He travelled accordingly that morning by branch lines from Hampshire into Surrey, and came to Broad Place in the glow of the afternoon. General Feversham was now within a few months of his eightieth year, and though his back was as stiff and his figure as erect as on that night now so many years ago when he first presented Harry to his Crimean friends, he was shrunken in stature, and his face seemed to have grown small. Durrance had walked with the general upon his terrace only two years ago, and blind though he was, he noticed a change within this interval of time. Old Feversham walked with a heavier step, and there had come a note of puerility into his voice.

"You have joined the veterans before your time, Durrance," he said. "I read of it in a newspaper. I would have written had I known where to write."

If he had any suspicion of Durrance's visit, he gave no sign of it. He rang the bell, and tea was brought into the great hall where the portraits hung. He asked after this and that officer in the Soudan with whom he was acquainted, he discussed the iniquities of the War Office, and feared that the country was going to the deuce.

"Everything through ill-luck or bad management is going to the devil, sir," he exclaimed irritably. "Even you, Durrance, you are not the same man who walked with me on my terrace two years ago."

The general had never been remarkable for tact, and the solitary life he led had certainly brought no improvement. Durrance could have countered with a _tu quoque_, but he refrained.

"But I come upon the same business," he said.

Feversham sat up stiffly in his chair.

"And I give you the same answer. I have nothing to say about Harry Feversham. I will not discuss him."

He spoke in his usual hard and emotionless voice. He might have been speaking of a stranger. Even the name was uttered without the slightest hint of sorrow. Durrance began to wonder whether the fountains of affection had not been altogether dried up in General Feversham's heart.

"It would not please you, then, to know where Harry Feversham has been, and how he has lived during the last five years?"

There was a pause--not a long pause, but still a pause--before General Feversham answered:--

"Not in the least, Colonel Durrance."

The answer was uncompromising, but Durrance relied upon the pause which preceded it.

"Nor on what business he has been engaged?" he continued.

"I am not interested in the smallest degree. I do not wish him to starve, and my solicitor tells me that he draws his allowance. I am content with that knowledge, Colonel Durrance."

"I will risk your anger, General," said Durrance. "There are times when it is wise to disobey one's superior officer. This is one of the times. Of course you can turn me out of the house. Otherwise I shall relate to you the history of your son and my friend since he disappeared from England."

General Feversham laughed.

"Of course, I can't turn you out of the house," he said; and he added severely, "But I warn you that you are taking an improper advantage of your position as my guest."

"Yes, there is no doubt of that," Durrance answered calmly; and he told his story--the recovery of the Gordon letters from Berber, his own meeting with Harry Feversham at Wadi Halfa, and Harry's imprisonment at Omdurman. He brought it down to that very day, for he ended with the news of Lieutenant Sutch's departure for Suakin. General Feversham heard the whole account without an interruption, without even stirring in his chair. Durrance could not tell in what spirit he listened, but he drew some comfort from the fact that he did listen and without argument.

For some while after Durrance had finished, the general sat silent. He raised his hand to his forehead and shaded his eyes as though the man who had spoken could see, and thus he remained. Even when he did speak, he did not take his hand away. Pride forbade him to show to those portraits on the walls that he was capable even of so natural a weakness as joy at the reconquest of honour by his son.

"What I don't understand," he said slowly, "is why Harry ever resigned his commission. I could not understand it before; I understand it even less now since you have told me of his great bravery. It is one of the queer inexplicable things. They happen, and there's all that can be said. But I am very glad that you compelled me to listen to you, Durrance."

"I did it with a definite object. It is for you to say, of course, but for my part I do not see why Harry should not come home and enter in again to all that he lost."

"He cannot regain everything," said Feversham. "It is not right that he should. He committed the sin, and he must pay. He cannot regain his career for one thing."

"No, that is true; but he can find another. He is not yet so old but that he can find another. And that is all that he will have lost."

General Feversham now took his hand away and moved in his chair. He looked quickly at Durrance; he opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind.

"Well," he said briskly, and as though the matter were of no particular importance, "if Sutch can manage Harry's escape from Omdurman, I see no reason, either, why he should not come home."

Durrance rose from his chair. "Thank you, General. If you can have me driven to the station, I can catch a train to town. There's one at six."

"But you will stay the night, surely," cried General Feversham.

"It is impossible. I start for Wiesbaden early to-morrow."

Feversham rang the bell and gave the order for a carriage. "I should have been very glad if you could have stayed," he said, turning to Durrance. "I see very few people nowadays. To tell the truth I have no great desire to see many. One grows old and a creature of customs."

"But you have your Crimean nights," said Durrance, cheerfully.

Feversham shook his head. "There have been none since Harry went away. I had no heart for them," he said slowly. For a second the mask was lifted and his stern features softened. He had suffered much during these five lonely years of his old age, though not one of his acquaintances up to this moment had ever detected a look upon his face or heard a sentence from his lips which could lead them so to think. He had shown a stubborn front to the world; he had made it a matter of pride that no one should be able to point a finger at him and say, "There's a man struck down." But on this one occasion and in these few words he revealed to Durrance the depth of his grief. Durrance understood how unendurable the chatter of his friends about the old days of war in the snowy trenches would have been. An anecdote recalling some particular act of courage would hurt as keenly as a story of cowardice. The whole history of his lonely life at Broad Place was laid bare in that simple statement that there had been no Crimean nights for he had no heart for them.

The wheels of the carriage rattled on the gravel.

"Good-bye," said Durrance, and he held out his hand.

"By the way," said Feversham, "to organise this escape from Omdurman will cost a great deal of money. Sutch is a poor man. Who is paying?"

"I am."

Feversham shook Durrance's hand in a firm clasp.

"It is my right, of course," he said.

"Certainly. I will let you know what it costs."

"Thank you."

General Feversham accompanied his visitor to the door. There was a question which he had it in his mind to ask, but the question was delicate. He stood uneasily on the steps of the house.

"Didn't I hear, Durrance," he said with an air of carelessness, "that you were engaged to Miss Eustace?"

"I think I said that Harry would regain all that he had lost except his career," said Durrance.

He stepped into the carriage and drove off to the station. His work was ended. There was nothing more for him now to do, except to wait at Wiesbaden and pray that Sutch might succeed. He had devised the plan, it remained for those who had eyes wherewith to see to execute it.

General Feversham stood upon the steps looking after the carriage until it disappeared among the pines. Then he walked slowly back into the hall. "There is no reason why he should not come back," he said. He looked up at the pictures. The dead Fevershams in their uniforms would not be disgraced. "No reason in the world," he said. "And, please God, he will come back soon." The dangers of an escape from the Dervish city remote among the sands began to loom very large on his mind. He owned to himself that he felt very tired and old, and many times that night he repeated his prayer, "Please God, Harry will come back soon," as he sat erect upon the bench which had once been his wife's favourite seat, and gazed out across the moonlit country to the Sussex Downs.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOUSE OF STONE

These were the days before the great mud wall was built about the House of Stone in Omdurman. Only a thorn zareeba as yet enclosed that noisome prison and the space about it. It stood upon the eastern border of the town, surely the most squalid capital of any empire since the world began. Not a flower bloomed in a single corner. There was no grass nor the green shade of any tree. A brown and stony plain, burnt by the sun, and, built upon it a straggling narrow city of hovels crawling with vermin and poisoned with disease.

Between the prison and the Nile no houses stood, and at this time the prisoners were allowed, so long as daylight lasted, to stumble in their chains down the half-mile of broken sloping earth to the Nile bank, so that they might draw water for their use and perform their ablutions. For the native or the negro, then, escape was not so difficult. For along that bank the dhows were moored and they were numerous; the river traffic, such as there was of it, had its harbour there, and the wide foreshore made a convenient market-place. Thus the open space between the river and the House of Stone was thronged and clamorous all day, captives rubbed elbows with their friends, concerted plans of escape, or then and there slipped into the thickest of the crowd and made their way to the first blacksmith, with whom the price of iron outweighed any risk he took. But even on their way to the blacksmith's shop, their fetters called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.

But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above all, devoted natives who would risk their lives, were the first necessities for their evasion. The camels might be procured and stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink at the last moment. Colonel Trench began to lose all hope. His friends were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem of the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the months dragged one after the other.

On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of anticipation. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.

"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.

Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.

Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door which he coveted at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner, he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the bruises of his neighbour's shackles; he would have, too, a support against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of suffocation.

"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"

That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid that yelling, struggling throng, he never got up again--he was trampled out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a frenzy like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing between two others, tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking at heads with the chain which dangled from the iron ring about his neck. He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping for breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all comers.

"If I were to fall!" he gasped. "O God, if I were to fall!" and he shouted aloud to his neighbour--for in that clamour nothing less than a shout was audible--"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him, "Yes, Effendi."

Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had sprung up. There were no prison rations at Omdurman; each captive was dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from Assouan or Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him, and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion to the Mahdist faith, or starved with such patience as he could. There were times, too, when Ibrahim had no friend to send him his meal into the prison. And thus each man helped the other in his need. They stood side by side against the wall at night.

"Yes, Effendi, I am here," and groping with his hand in the black darkness, he steadied Trench against the wall.

A fight of even more than common violence was raging in an extreme corner of the prison, and so closely packed were the prisoners that with each advance of one combatant and retreat of the other, the whole jostled crowd swayed in a sort of rhythm, from end to end, from side to side. But they swayed, fighting to keep their feet, fighting even with their teeth, and above the din and noise of their hard breathing, the clank of their chains, and their imprecations, there rose now and then a wild sobbing cry for mercy, or an inhuman shriek, stifled as soon as uttered, which showed that a man had gone down beneath the stamping feet. Missiles, too, were flung across the prison, even to the foul earth gathered from the floor, and since none knew from what quarter they were flung, heads were battered against heads in the effort to avoid them. And all these things happened in the blackest darkness.

For two hours Trench stood in that black prison ringing with noise, rank with heat, and there were eight hours to follow before the door would be opened and he could stumble into the clean air and fall asleep in the zareeba. He stood upon tiptoe that he might lift his head above his fellows, but even so he could barely breathe, and the air he breathed was moist and sour. His throat was parched, his tongue was swollen in his mouth and stringy like a dried fig. It seemed to him that the imagination of God could devise no worse hell than the House of Stone on an August night in Omdurman. It could add fire, he thought, but only fire.

"If I were to fall!" he cried, and as he spoke his hell was made perfect, for the door was opened. Idris es Saier appeared in the opening.

"Make room," he cried, "make room," and he threw fire among the prisoners to drive them from the door. Lighted tufts of dried grass blazed in the darkness and fell upon the bodies of the prisoners. The captives were so crowded they could not avoid the missiles; in places, even, they could not lift their hands to dislodge them from their shoulders or their heads.

"Make room," cried Idris. The whips of his fellow-gaolers enforced his command, the lashes fell upon all within reach, and a little space was cleared within the door. Into that space a man was flung and the door closed again.

Trench was standing close to the door; in the dim twilight which came through the doorway he had caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, a man heavily ironed, slight of figure, and bent with suffering.

"He will fall," he said, "he will fall to-night. God! if I were to!" and suddenly the crowd swayed against him, and the curses rose louder and shriller than before.

The new prisoner was the cause. He clung to the door with his face against the panels, through the chinks of which actual air might come. Those behind plucked him from his vantage, jostled him, pressed him backwards that they might take his place. He was driven as a wedge is driven by a hammer, between this prisoner and that, until at last he was flung against Colonel Trench.

The ordinary instincts of kindness could not live in the nightmare of that prison house. In the daytime, outside, the prisoners were often drawn together by their bond of a common misery; the faithful as often as not helped the infidel. But to fight for life during the hours of darkness without pity or cessation was the one creed and practice of the House of Stone. Colonel Trench was like the rest. The need to live, if only long enough to drink one drop of water in the morning and draw one clean mouthful of fresh air, was more than uppermost in his mind. It was the only thought he had.

"Back!" he cried violently, "back, or I strike!"--and, as he wrestled to lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling English.

"Don't fall," cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm. "Ibrahim, help! God, if he were to fall!" and while the crowd swayed again and the shrill cries and curses rose again, deafening the ears, piercing the brain, Trench supported his companion, and bending down his head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And the sound of it civilised him like the friendship of a woman.

He could not hear what was said; the din was too loud. But he caught, as it were, shadows of words which had once been familiar to him, which had been spoken to him, which he had spoken to others--as a matter of course. In the House of Stone they sounded most wonderful. They had a magic, too. Meadows of grass, cool skies, and limpid rivers rose in grey quiet pictures before his mind. For a moment he was insensible to his parched throat, to the stench of that prison house, to the oppressive blackness. But he felt the man whom he supported totter and slip, and again he cried to Ibrahim:--

"If he were to fall!"

Ibrahim helped as only he could. Together they fought and wrestled until those about them yielded, crying:--

"Shaitan! They are mad!"

They cleared a space in that corner and, setting the Englishman down upon the ground, they stood in front of him lest he should be trampled. And behind him upon the ground Trench heard every now and then in a lull of the noise the babble of English.

"He will die before morning," he cried to Ibrahim, "he is in a fever!"

"Sit beside him," said the Hadendoa. "I can keep them back."

Trench stooped and squatted in the corner, Ibrahim set his legs well apart and guarded Trench and his new friend.

Bending his head, Trench could now hear the words. They were the words of a man in delirium, spoken in a voice of great pleading. He was telling some tale of the sea, it seemed.

"I saw the riding lights of the yachts--and the reflections shortening and lengthening as the water rippled--there was a band, too, as we passed the pier-head. What was it playing? Not the overture--and I don't think that I remember any other tune...." And he laughed with a crazy chuckle. "I was always pretty bad at appreciating music, wasn't I? except when you played," and again he came back to the sea. "There was the line of hills upon the right as the boat steamed out of the bay--you remember there were woods on the hillside--perhaps you have forgotten. Then came Bray, a little fairyland of lights close down by the water at the point of the ridge ... you remember Bray, we lunched there once or twice, just you and I, before everything was settled ... it seemed strange to be steaming out of Dublin Bay and leaving you a long way off to the north among the hills ... strange and somehow not quite right ... for that was the word you used when the morning came behind the blinds--it is not right that one should suffer so much pain ... the engines didn't stop, though, they just kept throbbing and revolving and clanking as though nothing had happened whatever ... one felt a little angry about that ... the fairyland was already only a sort of golden blot behind ... and then nothing but sea and the salt wind ... and the things to be done."

The man in his delirium suddenly lifted himself upon an elbow, and with the other hand fumbled in his breast as though he searched for something. "Yes, the things to be done," he repeated in a mumbling voice, and he sank to unintelligible whisperings, with his head fallen upon his breast.

Trench put an arm about him and raised him up. But he could do nothing more, and even to him, crouched as he was close to the ground, the noisome heat was almost beyond endurance. In front, the din of shrill voices, the screams for pity, the swaying and struggling, went on in that appalling darkness. In one corner there were men singing in a mad frenzy, in another a few danced in their fetters, or rather tried to dance; in front of Trench Ibrahim maintained his guard; and beside Trench there lay in the House of Stone, in the town beyond the world, a man who one night had sailed out of Dublin Bay, past the riding lanterns of the yachts, and had seen Bray, that fairyland of lights, dwindle to a golden blot. To think of the sea and the salt wind, the sparkle of light as the water split at the ship's bows, the illuminated deck, perhaps the sound of a bell telling the hour, and the cool dim night about and above, so wrought upon Trench that, practical unimaginative creature as he was, for very yearning he could have wept. But the stranger at his side began to speak again.

"It is funny that those three faces were always the same ... the man in the tent with the lancet in his hand, and the man in the back room off Piccadilly ... and mine. Funny and not quite right. No, I don't think that was quite right either. They get quite big, too, just when you are going to sleep in the dark--quite big, and they come very close to you and won't go away ... they rather frighten one...." And he suddenly clung to Trench with a close, nervous grip, like a boy in an extremity of fear. And it was in the tone of reassurance that a man might use to a boy that Trench replied, "It's all right, old man, it's all right."

But Trench's companion was already relieved of his fear. He had come out of his boyhood, and was rehearsing some interview which was to take place in the future.