He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh. "Reminds one--eh?--of the famous stage-direction in _The Rovers-- Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years' War_. . . . Well? What are you still staring at? . . . Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes. . . . Yes; I should inform you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood, and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them. I bought them on the way along." He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan. His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered. . . . Yes, cheapened and coarsened, in some indefinable way. His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch: still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim. I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow. Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat, showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me. When a lost friend returns as it were from the grave--from shipwreck, at any rate, and uncharted travel--you look to find him gaunt, brown, leathery, hollow of cheek and eye, eh? Foe's appearance didn't answer to this conception . . . not one little bit. "Then you didn't sail in the _Eurotas_, after all?" said I, finding speech. "We saw your name on the list." "Oh, yes, I did," he interrupted. "And, by the way, we shall have to talk about her--or, rather, about what I ought to do. . . . Yes, I know what you'll be advising. 'Go straight to Lloyd's,' no doubt." "Man alive," said I, "why not? If you were aboard of her--and if, as you tell me, you fetched somehow to Sydney--why in God's name hasn't Lloyd's heard of it months ago? There are such things as cables. . . . Unless, to be sure, you have a reason?" "I have and I haven't," said Jack. "My turning-up doesn't hurt anyone, does it? The _Eurotas_ went down, sure enough: and _I_ didn't scuttle her, if that's what you suspect." "Please don't be an ass, Jack," I pleaded. "Well, I don't see," he continued, ruminating, "--I don't see any way but to go to Lloyd's and tell them about it. Yet equally I don't see what good it can do. The underwriters have paid up, eh?"