"Why, what else could you call it? You surely didn't want that woman hanging round your neck all your life like a mill-stone, did you? What if she did keep hold of the money? I call it cheap at the price. And suppose you'd brought her. How could you have squared things? _I_ call it lucky." Mr. Spokesly, however, did not feel that way. He looked round at the green expanse of St. James's Park and up towards the enormous arch which enshrines the dignity and cumbrous power of the Victorian Age, and wondered if the taste of life would ever come back. It was now eighteen months since he had experienced what the elderly lieutenant called uncommon luck, when a sloop of war, hurrying on her regular patrol from Lemnos to Malta had found him and Mr. Cassar in their boat some ten miles east of Psara Island, a black spot on a blue sea, over which there fluttered a patch of white. And on coming cautiously alongside, the commander of that sloop was surprised to discover a Maltee engineer somewhat in disarray through his struggles with his engine, and under a blanket in the bilge forward a sick Englishman. For Mr. Spokesly had been sick. Looking back at it from this seat in St. James's Park, with his demobilization completed, he saw well enough that the culmination of the spiritual stresses under which he had been existing had been suddenly transmuted into a bodily collapse. As the sun rose over the Ægean, he had given the tiller to Mr. Cassar and lain down without a word. He had not cared whether he ever got up or not. He lay staring up at the extraordinary brilliance of the sky, his throat very sore, his eyes tired and smarting, a feverish tremor in his limbs, refusing food, and even when the engine stopped, giving no sign that he was aware of any change in their fortunes. It had only been when Mr. Cassar informed him of the sloop bearing down upon them that he rose on an elbow and croaked hoarsely: "Show a white flag; handkerchief or something," and fell back, drawing the blanket over himself. He had been very sick. The surgeon, without waiting for a temperature reading, had carried him away into an extremely hygienic sick-bay, where between a boy with tonsillitis and a stoker with a burnt arm, he had lain all the way to Malta. And after that, during weeks of dreary waiting, he had looked out of the high windows of the Bighi Hospital across the Harbour to Valletta, watching the ships go in and out, and seeing the great flame of the sunset show up the battlements of the Lower Barracca and die in purple glory behind the domes and turrets of the city.