Now Hugh and Lamoir were a difficult pair to know, together or singly. Hugh wasn’t at all your democratic sort, there was nothing at all easy-going about him. I remember once seeing him in a crowded room and thinking he was like an island of nerves in an ocean of grins. Lamoir said he was proud. He simply didn’t seem to concern himself at all with other people’s opinions; it was as though he just hadn’t the time to go about dealing in the slack forms of geniality which pass for manners in this century. That is Hugh’s phrase, not mine. Lamoir left him about nine years ago. They say that people made a great fuss over Lamoir when she first came from India, because she was so lovely. That must have been about twenty-five years ago, and about nine years ago she packed up a lot of trunks and went to Algeria. People were very surprised at that, for Lamoir was beloved of everyone, and she seemed to be liking her life in England--as much, anyhow, as anyone ever does seem to like his or her life in England, for there seems to be a feeling in people that one shouldn’t like living in England. I like it very much myself, but then I am not English. People said vaguely that she was going away because her heart was weak--quite all right, but weak, and that she must have quiet. She never came back. I went to see her in Algeria two winters ago. I wanted very much just to see how she was in that solitary new life. Naturally I didn’t tell Hugh the main reason why I was going to Algeria, and I think he had an idea I was going there to try to write a book about it, one of those marvellous books about sheiks and sand and suburban Englishwomen with love flaming in their eyes to such a degree that none of their friends at home would ever recognise them. As Hugh never used to speak of his wife one had nothing to go on as to what his feelings about her were, and so, of course, one said nothing about her either. Just the same, that is how I found Lamoir. She had the grace of silence, of reflection, to a rare degree. Some people found her frightfully dull, but then imagine what “some people” are, it can be said that their disapproval is a distinction that no fairly admirable person should ever be without. The house she was living in had been the palace of the last of the Admirals of the Dey’s fleet, Lamoir said, and one could well believe it. There were dungeons below, deep, dark, crooked, with chains and iron clamps on the walls where the poor devils of Christian slaves used to be kept, and on the morning Lamoir was showing me round there was a vampire-bat hanging asleep from the black broken walls. From the dungeons there was a secret passage, Lamoir said, down to the bay two miles away at the foot of the hill, and through this passage the old Admiral scoundrel had tried to escape when the French stormed the town about eighty years ago--or maybe it was more or less than eighty years ago; I don’t know when it was, and Lamoir didn’t know either.