Up to half-past nine they discussed the blue envelope with every inmate of the house, from Mrs John Desmond, the housekeeper, down to the voiceless but eloquent decanter of port that stood between them, first on the arm of one chair, then the other. They were very old men; they could soliloquise without in the least disturbing each other. An observer would say, during these periods of abstraction, that their remarks were addressed to the decanter, and that the poor decanter had something to say in return. But, for all that, their eyes seldom left the broad blue envelope that had lain there since half-past eight. They knew that it came directly or indirectly from the man to whom they owed their present condition of comfort and security after half a century of vicissitudes; from the man whose life they had saved more than once in those old, evil days when comforts were so few that they passed without recognition in the maelstrom of events. From mid-ocean James Brood was speaking to his son. His words--perhaps his cry for help--were lying there on the end of the table, confined in a flimsy blue envelope, and no one dared to liberate them. Frederic Brood deserved a thrashing for staying out so late--at least, so the decanter had been told a dozen times or more, and the clock, too, for that matter, to say nothing of the confidences reposed in the coal-scuttle, the fire implements, and other patient listeners of a like character. It may be well to state that these bosom friends and comrades of half a hundred years had quarrelled at seven o'clock that evening over a very important matter--the accuracy of individual timepieces. The watch of Mr Danbury Dawes had said it was five minutes before seven; that of Mr Joseph Riggs three minutes after. Since then neither had spoken to the other, but each slyly had set his watch by the big clock in the hall before going into dinner, and was prepared to meet any argument. Twenty years ago these two old cronies had met James Brood in one of the blackest holes of Calcutta, a derelict being swept to perdition with the swiftness and sureness of a tide that knows no pause. They found him when the dregs were at his lips and the stupor of defeat in his brain. Without meaning to be considered Samaritans, good or bad, they dragged him from the depths and found that they had revived _a man_. Those were the days when James Brood's life meant nothing to him, days when he was tortured by the thought that it would be all too long for him to endure; yet he was not the kind to murder himself as men do who lack the courage to go on living.