T. Tembarom talked but little as he sat in his big chair and smoked. Best let him alone and give him time to get used to the newness, he thought. Nothing must happen that could give him a jolt. Let things sort of sink into him, and perhaps they’d set him to thinking and lead him somewhere. Strangeways himself evidently did not want talk. He never wanted it unless he was excited. He was not excited now, and had settled down as if he was comfortable. Having finished one cigar, he took another, and began to smoke it much more slowly than he had smoked his first. The slowness began to arrest Tembarom’s attention. This was the smoking of a man who was either growing sleepy or sinking into deep thought, becoming oblivious to what he was doing. Sometimes he held the cigar absently between his strong, fine fingers, seeming to forget it. Tembarom watched him do this until he saw it go out, and its white ash drop on the rug at his feet. He did not notice it, but sat sinking deeper and deeper into his own being, growing more remote. What was going on under his absorbed stillness? Tembarom would not have moved or spoken “for a block of Fifth Avenue,” he said internally. The dark eyes seemed to become darker until there was only a pin’s point of light to be seen in their pupils. It was as if he were looking at something at a distance--at a strangely long distance. Twice he turned his head and appeared to look slowly round the room, but not as normal people look--as if it also was at the strange, long distance from him, and he were somewhere outside its walls. It was an uncanny thing to behold. “How dead-still the room is!” Tembarom found himself thinking. It was “dead-still.” And it was “a queer deal,” sitting, not daring to move, just watching. Something was bound to happen, sure. What was it going to be? Strangeways’s cigar dropped from his fingers and appeared to rouse him. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then stooped quite naturally to pick it up. “I forgot it altogether. It’s gone out,” he remarked. “Have another,” suggested Tembarom, moving the box nearer to him. “No, thank you.” He rose and crossed the room to the wall of book-shelves. And Tembarom’s eye was caught again by the fineness of movement and line the evening clothes made manifest. “What a swell he looked when he moved about like that! What a swell, by jingo!” He looked along the line of shelves and presently took a book down and opened it. He turned over its leaves until something arrested his attention, and then he fell to reading. He read several minutes, while Tembarom watched him. The silence was broken by his laughing a little. “Listen to this,” he said, and began to read something in a language totally unknown to his hearer. “A man who writes that sort of thing about a woman is an old bounder, whether he’s a poet or not. There’s a small, biting spitefulness about it that’s cattish.” “_Who_ did it?” Tembarom inquired softly. It might be a good idea to lead him on.