Gumbril felt, all of a sudden, the need to speak confidentially. “There was a time,” he said in a tone that was quite unreally airy, off-hand and disengaged, “years ago, when I totally lost my head about her. Totally.” Those tear-wet patches on his pillow, cold against his cheek in the darkness; and oh, the horrible pain of weeping, vainly, for something that was nothing, that was everything in the world! “Towards the end of the war it was. I remember walking up this dismal street one night, in the pitch darkness, writhing with jealousy.” He was silent. Spectrally, like a dim, haunting ghost, he had hung about her; dumbly, dumbly imploring, appealing. “The weak, silent man,” she used to call him. And once for two or three days, out of pity, out of affection, out of a mere desire, perhaps, to lay the tiresome ghost, she had given him what his mournful silence implored—only to take it back, almost as soon as accorded. That other night, when he had walked up this street before, desire had eaten out his vitals and his body seemed empty, sickeningly and achingly void; jealousy was busily reminding him, with an unflagging malice, of her beauty—of her beauty and the hateful, ruffian hands which now caressed, the eyes which looked on it. That was all long ago. “She is certainly handsome,” said Shearwater, commenting, at one or two removes, on Gumbril’s last remark. “I can see that she might make any one who got involved in her decidedly uncomfortable.” After a day or two’s continuous sweating, it suddenly occurred to him, one might perhaps find sea-water more refreshing than fresh water. That would be queer. Gumbril burst out ferociously laughing. “But there were other times,” he went on jauntily, “when other people were jealous of me.” Ah, revenge, revenge. In the better world of the imagination it was possible to get one’s own back. What fiendish vendettas were there carried to successful ends! “I remember once writing her a quatrain in French.” (He had written it years after the whole thing was over, he had never sent it to any one at all; but that was all one.) “How did it go? Ah, yes.” And he recited, with suitable gestures: “‘Puisque nous sommes là, je dois, Vous avertir, sans trop de honte, Que je n’égale pas le Comte Casanovesque de Sixfois.’ Rather prettily turned, I flatter myself. Rather elegantly gross.” Gumbril’s laughter went hooting past the Marble Arch. It stopped rather suddenly, however, at the corner of the Edgware Road. He had suddenly remembered Mr. Mercaptan, and the thought depressed him. CHAPTER VI