‘Why, look here,’ he said; ‘if that rascal can make a reputation and money by his stuff, which is only mine diluted and spoilt, surely for the genuine work of the real man’—— ‘If you are trusting to that, I must decline to advance any money for the speculation. Why on earth, man, when you had a sufficient income paid you regularly, and lived as you liked, did you give it up and embark on a sea of trouble?’ ‘Because I have a mission in this world, which I dream sometimes I shall accomplish.’ ‘And the mission is?’ ‘To open the eyes of fools.’ ‘My dear fellow, they object to the operation, and have punished a good many people for trying it.’ ‘Then I will be punished,’ he said. ‘But anyhow, I’ll expose these wretched smatterers, who serve up my things with all their wit and wisdom taken out of them, who travesty my best thoughts. Why, they have even made vulgar my very name!’ ‘Houlot?’ I said, ‘Houlot? Is that the French for Dawson or Collingwood?’ ‘That is not my real name,’ he said. ‘I abandoned that years ago. Every one turned his back upon the name. I did so myself at last.’ ‘One of the results of the eye-opening process, I suppose?’ He nodded sullenly. ‘My name used to be Dawson,’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say,’ I cried, ‘that you are the Dawson who was supposed to have been drowned years and years ago?’ ‘I was that man—that unhappy man! But why,’ he cried, turning round fiercely upon me, ‘why do you make me go back to all these hateful things?’ ‘Then is the memory of your former life hateful to you?’ ‘I escaped from the most wretched condition that a man was ever in: tied to a woman who made my life an intolerable burden. She was not a bad woman, not an unworthy woman. She was—— Well, she had a mother who was fat and well to do, and lived in St John’s Wood.’ Houlot laughed hoarsely, knocked out his pipe on the empty stove, looked mechanically for some tobacco in a jar on the chimney-piece. It was empty. I offered him my pouch, which he took with an indignant scowl. ‘Well, I was meant for great things,’ he went on between the whiffs of his pipe—‘meant for great things; and here I am. Life fribbled and frittered away, and that woman the main cause of it! There was no escape from her any other way. I believe in my heart that the woman loved me in her fashion; all the greater was my unutterable woe.’ ‘And you ran away from her?’