“IF in this miserable hour I’ve asked you for a moment of your time,” Dennis immediately said, “ I beg you to believe it’s only to let you know that anything in this world I can do for you “ Tony

raised a hand that mutely discouraged as well as thanked him, but he completely delivered himself: “I’m ready, whatever it is, to do on the spot.”

With his handsome face smitten, his red eyes contracted, his thick hair disordered and his black garments awry, Tony had the handled, hustled look of a man just dragged through some riot or some rescue and only released to take breath. Like Rose, for Dennis, he was deeply disfigured, but with a change more passive and tragic. His bloodshot eyes fixed his interlocutor’s. “ I’m afraid there’s nothing any one can do for me. My disaster’s over whelming; but I must meet it myself.”

There was courtesy in his voice; but there was something hard and dry in the way he stood there, something so opposed to his usual fine overflow that for a minute Dennis could only show by pitying silence the full sense of his wretchedness. He was in the presence of a passionate perversity an atti tude in which the whole man had already petrified.

“Will it perhaps help you to think of something,” he presently said, “ if I tell you that your disaster is almost as much mine as yours, and that what’s of aid to one of us may perhaps therefore be of aid to the other?”

“It’s very good of you,” Tony replied, “to be willing to take upon you the smallest corner of so big a burden. Don’t do that don’t do that, Mr. Vidal,” he repeated, with a heavy head-shake. “Don’t come near such a thing; don’t touch it; don’t know it!” He straightened himself as if with a long, suppressed shudder; and then with a sharper and more sombre vehemence, “ Stand from under it!” he exclaimed. Dennis, in deeper compassion, looked at him with an intensity that might have suggested submission, and Tony followed up what he apparently took for an advantage. “ You came here for an hour, for your own reasons, for your relief: you came in all kindness and trust. You’ve encountered an unutterable horror, and you’ve only one thing to do.”

“Be so good as to name it,” said Dennis. “Turn your back on it for ever go your way this minute. I’ve come to you simply to say that.”

“Leave you, in other words? ”

“By the very first train that will take you.” Dennis appeared to turn this over; then he spoke with a face that showed what he thought of it. “ It has been my unfortunate fate in coming to this place so wrapped, as one might suppose, in comfort and peace to intrude a second time on obscure, unhappy things, on suffering and danger and death. I should have been glad, God knows, not to renew the adven ture, but one’s destiny kicks one before it, and I seem myself not the least part of the misery I speak of. You must accept that as my excuse for not taking your advice. I must stay at least till you understand me.” On this he waited a moment; after which, abruptly, impatiently, “ For God’s sake, Mr. Bream, believe in me and meet me!” he broke out.

“Meet you? ”

“Make use of the hand I hold out to you! ” Tony had remained just within the closed door, as if to guard against its moving from the other side. At this, with a faint flush in his dead vacancy, he came a few steps further. But there was something still locked in his conscious, altered eyes, and coldly absent from the tone in which he said: “ You’ve come, I think, from China? ”

“I’ve come, Mr. Bream, from China.”

“And it’s open to you to go back? ” Dennis frowned. “ I can do as I wish.”

“And yet you’re not off like a shot? ”

“My movements and my inclinations are my own affair. You won’t accept my aid? ”

Tony gave his sombre stare. “ You ask me, as you call it, to meet you. I beg you to excuse me if on my side I first inquire on what definite ground? ”

Dennis took him straight up. “ On the definite ground on which Doctor Ramage is good enough to do so. I’m afraid there’s no better ground than my honour.”

Tony’s stare was long and deep; then he put out his hand, and while D............