And she--she of course couldn't even understand what was the matter. She saw that he was unhappy, she thought she had done something wrong. She reasoned like a child that it was because she wasn't like the white ladies whom she used to see in Colombo. So she went and bought stays and white cotton stockings and shoes, and she squeezed herself into them. But the stays and the shoes and stockings didn't do her any good. It couldn't go on like that. At last I induced Reynolds to go away. He was to continue his travels but he was coming back--he said so over and over again to me and to Celestinahami. Meanwhile she was well provided for; a deed was executed: the house and the coconut trees and the little compound by the sea were to be hers--a generous settlement, a donatio inter vivos, as the lawyers call it--void, eh?--or voidable?--because for an immoral consideration. Lord! I'm nearly forgetting my law, but I believe the law holds that only future consideration of that sort can be immoral. How wise, how just, isn't it? The past cannot be immoral; it's done with, wiped out--but the future? Yes, it's only the future that counts. So Reynolds wiped out his past and Celestinahami by the help of a dirty Burgher lawyer and a deed of gift and a ticket issued by Thomas Cook and Son for a berth in a P and O bound for Aden. I went on board to see him off and I shook his hand and told him encouragingly that everything would be all right. I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court. Yes, I identified her: Celestinahami--I never knew her other name. She lay there in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and white shoes. They had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow--bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes. ***** Jessop stopped. No one spoke for a minute or two. Then Hanson Smith stretched himself, yawned, and got up. "Battle, murder, and sentimentality," he said. "You're as bad as the rest of them, Jessop. I'd like to hear your other case--but it's too late, I'm off to bed." PEARLS AND SWINE I had finished my hundred up--or rather he had--with the Colonel and we strolled into the smoking room for a smoke and a drink rotund the fire before turning in. There were three other men already round the fire and they widened their circle to take us in. I didn't know them, hadn't spoken to them or indeed to anyone except the Colonel in the large gaudy uncomfortably comfortable hotel. I was run down, out of sorts generally, and--like a fool, I thought now--had taken a week off to eat, or rather to read the menus of interminable table d'hôte dinners, to play golf and to walk on the "front" at Torquay.