The afternoon was slipping by. Danby took out his watch, he had been an hour at Rocozanne, had lost the chance of catching one train, and unless he caught the next would miss _table d'hôte_ at Bree's. But he wished to miss _table d'hôte_. It would suffice to be back in time for a few words with Kerr over their last cigars. 'Spend the evening with us,' said Ambrose, feeling inspired. 'Thanks,' said Danby. They sat on until tea was announced. Mr. Piton, a cheery, gnome-like little old man, though acquainted with the whole complication of Danby's affairs, ignored every interest that did not bear on Indian statistics. Over these he developed an insatiable curiosity. Ambrose, listening in amused laziness, realised for once that impersonality only is needed to divert tropical heat from the emotional to the matter-of-fact. He now felt himself cool though broiling in the Indian sun with Danby in a linen suit and puggaree. Danby was equal to the occasion. He could dismiss personal feeling. He had had all his life a passion for accuracy, which circumstances had fostered by sending him out to our great Oriental Empire, where different races and religions swarm. He had set himself to master its antagonistic facts. Work there gradually gave him wealth, position, and after a few years a tone of level self-satisfaction, not, strictly speaking, to be called happiness, yet not far from that. He was grateful, and left with a mind encyclopediacally stored with details of its internal fibre. Nothing thus could have soothed him better than this talk with Mr. Piton. It carried him back to old absorbing interests, and eased the tension on a capacity for emotion whose slumber he had, until this afternoon, mistaken for death. It was late when he got back to St. Helier's, but as he crossed the street to Bree's he recognised Kerr standing in the portico. He reached him just as he threw away his cigar-end. Kerr was looking down, but when he uttered his name he glanced up quickly. Afterwards he told his wife that there was a _living_ tone in his voice that had convinced him he was not, after all, a mummy. 'I want a word with you,' Danby said with a strange new eagerness that became in him almost inarticulation. 'It's a preposterous question to ask, but I really am in the dark--who is Miss Marlowe?' Kerr stared at him, not understanding. His loathing for what he thought the jugglery of the question expressed itself in his face. Danby saw it. For a moment a dangerous gleam of anger scintillated in his eyes--but after all was it not the way of the world to judge by the evil construction rather than the good? There was also an element of absurdity in the question as sincere. He had been so keenly conscious of this as to guard his ignorance from Ambrose Piton.