"Such peculiar echoes!" "I don't hear any echoes." "Well, when you went to the door--you heard that?" "Oh, that wasn't an echo: that was somebody spoke outside." "Somebody spoke outside? What did she say? What was it you heard?" "Couldn't say. What did you?" "Well, what I heard sounded like a sort of bastard Italian." Mr. Hughes said this to sound grand. "You shut up and listen a minute." Mr. Aiken shut up, and the two sat listening in the half-dark. Now, whenever sounds are listened for, they show a most obliging spirit, becoming audible where you thought silence was going on peacefully alone. The first sound that made Mr. Hughes say "There now!--what's that?" turned out to be the gas, which, at a carefully chosen point, rippled. The next proved to be an intermittent spring fizzing on the hot stove from a water-jar placed upon it. The third was a spontaneous insect unknown to Entomology, which had faced the difficulties of self-making, behind the skirting, and evidently was not going to remain a mere cipher. The fourth was something or other that squeaked on the table, and if one changed the places of things, noises like that always stopped. So Mr. Aiken shifted the things about, and said Mr. Hughes would see that would stop it. He faced the responsibilities of the Investigator by quenching the phenomenon, a time-honoured method. He wrapped up the photograph, and put it away in a drawer to show to Euphemia. It would be interestin' to see if she recognized it.... Oh yes! she would be back in the next few days--sure to! And Mr. Hughes saw that the shifting about of the things on the table _had_ stopped the noise he called an echo, and what more could he or anybody want? So he sat down again and had some toddy, and talked about the Idea. And towards one in the morning he got the opportunity of checking off three heads on his three fingers, and feeling that he ought to have been in Parliament. He had felt previously rather like a Seneschal with three spears vacant over his portcullis, longing for a healthy decapitation to give them employment. The foregoing chapter, apart from the way in which it emphasizes Mr. Aiken's loneliness and discontent as a bachelor, would be just as well left out of the story, but for the seemingly insignificant incident of the echo, or whatever it was, which might have been unintelligible if referred to hereafter, without its surroundings. CHAPTER VI