‘Well, I’ll wish you good night. It’s getting late, and I suppose the George is an early house. _Au revoir_, Mr. Clare. By the way, when you told me your name just now I forgot to ask you how you came to be so familiar with mine.’ ‘I saw it in the newspapers, in the report of the inquest on Madame Chicot.’ ‘True. I had told you that I was Jack Chicot’s fellow-lodger. I had forgotten that. Good night.’ ‘You are still living in Cibber Street, I suppose?’ ‘No, the house became hateful to me after that terrible event. Mrs. Evitt lost both her lodgers. Mrs. Rawber, the tragédienne, moved two doors off. My address is at the Poste Restante all over Europe. But for the next week or so I may be found at Paris.’ ‘Good night,’ said Edward. ‘I must come downstairs and let you out. My people ought to be home by this time, and perhaps you may not care to meet them.’ ‘It is indifferent to me,’ Desrolles answered loftily. They did not encounter the Vicar or his wife on the stairs. The children’s party had been kept up till the desperate hour of half-past ten, and Mr. and Mrs. Clare were now on their road home, leaving Celia behind them to spend Christmas Day with the Trevertons. CHAPTER XXVIII. EDWARD CLARE GOES ON A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY. To sit beside a man’s hearth, drink his wine, shoot his pheasants and ride his horses, would in a savage community be incompatible with the endurance of a deadly hatred against that man. The thoroughbred savage hates only his enemy and the intruding stranger. Mr. Stanley tells us that if he could once get close enough to a tribe to hold a parley with them, he and his followers were safe. The difficulty was that they had to encounter a shower of arrows before they could get within range for conversation. When the noble African found that the explorer meant kindly, he no longer thirsted for the white man’s blood. His savagery for the most part meant self-defence.