It was not difficult, he found, to discover the dealers in drugs and he set out, as a buyer of tobacco. But although his first trip to Saloniki and back to Alexandria was successful and enormously profitable, he became aware that he was being uncomfortably shadowed, and he left again in an Italian steamer. It was here he encountered Mr. Dainopoulos, bound home from a business trip to Egypt; where he had been buying up cheap the stocks of ship-chandlers who had been caught by the sudden withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles for service in the north. Mr. Dainopoulos had bought a small ship and now needed a commander. So far, one might say, Captain Rannie had simply lived the life of many of his condition, Englishmen who had grown soft and flaccid during their long exiles and who now crept furtively along in the shadow of war, neither very honest nor very crooked, ignoble and negligible. But as he sat there now behind his locked door and heavy curtain, shading his eyes with his hand, he faced the immediate future with dread. The sight of Mr. Spokesly, bandaged and plastered, hurrying out to get on with the work, made him see with painful clearness where he himself had fallen and how problematic was the task ahead. He would not tackle a job like this again, he told himself. Never again. He would get away out East again with what he had already made and resume the old, safe, easy river-life, receiving his stacks of "reading matter" from London, reading until his brain was soft and soggy with foolish dreams. It was the best life he knew and he longed to get back to it. After this voyage. How he hated all this! When he came back into the world of urgent men after one of his long periods of stupor, he was horrified at the necessity of living at all, and sometimes contemplated suicide. Now he was afraid, not so much of any punishment which might befall him as of the destruction of his way of life, the harsh secular interferences, the spying out of his useless secrets and his long-hid dishonour. It was his very life now, this carefully contrived oblivion in which he lay like an insect in a cocoon. It was beyond his power to desire a return to England. The very thought made him tremble. One of the secrets he guarded with such hysterical care was his loathing of women. Men thought him a rake, _a viveur--ha-ha_! That was what he wanted them to think. He could not bear any intimacy at all. This new chief officer--that was the disturbing element in his reverie--must be given to understand there could be no intimacy, none whatever.