Charmed by this sign of Emmy’s renewed interest in serious themes, my Uncle Spencer explained to her what Alphonse at any rate thought would happen to him. At midday, over the repeated cabbage soup and the horrible boiled meat, the bank clerk, with characteristically tasteless facetiousness, asked, “How’s our one little nigger boy?” Emmy looked at him with disgust and anger. “I think you’re perfectly horrible,” she said. And, lowering her voice reverently, she went on, “The doctor says he’s going to die.” The bank clerk was unabashed. “Oh, he’s going to kick the bucket, is he? Poor old blacky!” Emmy made no answer; there was a general silence. It was as though somebody had started to make an unseemly noise in a church. Afterwards, in the privacy of the little room, where, among the filing cabinets and the dusty papers, the Dravidian lay contentedly dying, Emmy turned to my Uncle Spencer and said, “You know, Uncle Spenny, I think you’re a wonderfully decent sort. I do, really.” My Uncle Spencer was too much overcome to say anything but “Emmy, Emmy,” two or three times. He took her hand and, very gently, kissed it. That afternoon they went on talking about all the things that might conceivably happen after one were dead. Emmy told my Uncle Spencer all that she had thought when she got the telegram--two years ago it was, and she was working in a hall at Glasgow, one of her first engagements, too--saying that her father had suddenly died. He drank too much, her father did; and he wasn’t kind to mother when he wasn’t himself. But she had been very fond of him, all the same; and when that telegram came she wondered and wondered.... My Uncle Spencer listened attentively, happy in having this new glimpse of her past; he forgot the other incident, which the beam of her confession had illumined for him. Late that evening, after having lain for a long time quite still, as though he were asleep, Alphonse suddenly stirred, opened his large black eyes, and began to talk, at first in the incomprehensible language which came from him in delirium, then, when he realised that his listeners did not understand him, more slowly and in his strange pidgin-French. “I have seen everything just now,” he said--“everything.” “But what?” they asked. “All that is going to happen. I have seen that this war will last a long time--a long time. More than fifty months.” And he prophesied enormous calamities. My Uncle Spencer, who knew for certain that the war couldn’t possibly last more than three months, was incredulous. But Emmy, who had no preconceived ideas on war and a strong faith in oracles, stopped him impatiently when he wanted to bring the Dravidian to silence. “Tell me,” she said, “what’s going to happen to us.” She had very little interest in the fate of civilisation. “I am going to die,” Alphonse began. My Uncle Spencer made certain deprecating little noises. “No, no,” he protested.