“To have heard nothing, young man, is to have heard good news. But sit down, the doctor himself will tell you in one moment--” That demoniac bell! It clanged through the place. Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible bell to a nursing-home. The fat old woman grinned vindictively at me. We had been enemies, now we were allies against the intruder. “Bah!” she said, and opened the door. From where I stood I could not see who was without, but I could hear a voice: low, hesitating, in very correct French, in Foreign Office French.... “Napier!” ... We stared at each other in the most profound surprise and confusion. Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine ... just here, just now, facing me in the obscure silence of the Paris night! “This is funny,” Napier made to smile. “What?” Napier Harpenden and I had known each other well, as “well” goes, for years, but never before had we been alone together. But once, some years ago, I had seen him in a curious moment. Late one night I was walking down a villainous alley near the East India Docks when through a lighted window I was astonished to see Napier’s white, thin, fine face and those dark fevered eyes. He was talking earnestly to an old man and a very pretty young girl who was crying, and I felt ashamed to have seen him, for that is how Napier affected one, you were hurt at the idea of hurting him. I had wondered often what he could have been doing there, what secret good work he was at. He was a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism of gods or men.... He still stood outside, a serious slack shape in a tweed overcoat. He masked, behind that faint, deprecating smile of his, more than the mere confusion of surprise. He would very much rather it had not been me he had met just there. Napier and I were friends only because all our friends were mutual. We hadn’t ever found, tried to find, any common ground for friendship. Sincerely, I was very sorry to be there. Napier had that effect on one. “Venice is waiting in the taxi,” he said. Whenever Napier and I met he would instantly speak of Venice. This was to show me that he knew Venice and I were great friends and that, if he and I weren’t great friends, that must somehow be his fault. How could you help liking a man like that? The courtesy of that favourite of the gods went so much deeper than any one else’s: let it one day go a little deeper, and you felt that it might have gone a little too deep, down, down to self-destruction.