“I took up my life again very much where I had left it, and now again a change came about in my thoughts; they were constantly occupied with Ruth and with that examination I had so long put off, of her relations with her husband. As the story which I shall presently tell you will make them quite clear to you—if anything so involved can ever be made quite clear—I shall not bore you now with my own conjectures. It is quite bad enough that I should bore you with my own life, but you will agree that I couldn’t say to you, ‘Now ten years passed,’ without giving you the slightest idea of my movements during those ten years. Those ten years, you see, are my little Odyssey; I look back on them now, and I see them in that light, but while they lasted I naturally didn’t look on them as a poetic spell out of my life; no, I looked on them as a sample of what my life would be till it came to the simplest of all ends: death. I supposed that I should stay at Ephesus with MacPherson till he got tired of excavating, which I knew would never happen, or till I got tired of excavating, which I thought was much more likely, or till the authorities turned us out. After that I didn’t know what I should do, but I thought, so far as I ever thought about it at all, that something would turn up in much the same way as the boat at Smyrna had turned up to take me to Baku. What did occasionally exercise my mind was the question whether I should ever see England again? If I couldn’t have Ruth I didn’t want to go to England; it would be a torment to know her so near; but on the other hand I foresaw that as an old man of seventy I should not want to be still knocking about the world or excavating at Ephesus. The ravens would have to provide. Why make plans? Fate only steps in and upsets them. How angry I used to make you by talking about Fate, do you remember? “Meanwhile my Odyssey continued, and I found that every year my restlessness returned to me, so that sooner or later the moment always came when I said to MacPherson,— “‘I am afraid I shall have to go away to-morrow,’ and he replied invariably,— “‘Oh? All right.’