“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend on it there are always good reasons. I should have preferred—yes—it had been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him——!” With which Schinkel’s lucidity dropped and lost itself in a thick cloud of smoke. “Well, if they didn’t send to him——?” Hyacinth persisted. “You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?” At this Hyacinth looked up at him askance and caught an ambiguous, an evasive roll in his companion’s small, mild eye. “If it’s anything against him my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.” “Well, it’s a possibility they’re not satisfied.” “How do you mean it—not satisfied?” “How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.” “Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!” “Ah my boy, depend upon it there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and in a moment he added: “They know everything—everything. They’re like the great God of the believers: they’re searchers of hearts; and not only of hearts, but of all a man’s life—his days, his nights, his spoken, his unspoken words. Oh they go deep and they go straight!” The pair pursued the rest of their course for the most part in silence, Hyacinth being considerably struck with something that dropped from his companion in answer to a question he asked as to what Eustache Poupin had said when Schinkel, this evening, first told him what he had come to see him about. “_Il vaut du galme—il vaut du galme_”: that was the German’s version of the Frenchman’s words; and Hyacinth repeated them over to himself several times and almost with the same accent. They had a certain soothing effect. In fact the good Schinkel was somehow salutary altogether, as our hero felt when they stopped at last at the door of his lodging in Westminster and stood there face to face while Hyacinth waited—just waited. The sharpness of his impatience had passed away and he watched without irritation the loving manner in which his mate shook the ashes out of the big smoked-out—so vehemently smoked-out—pipe and laid it to rest in its coffin. It was only after he had gone through this business with his usual attention to every detail of it that he said “_Also_, now for the letter” and, putting his hand inside his old waistcoat, drew forth the portentous missive. It passed instantly into Hyacinth’s grasp, and our young man transferred it to his own pocket without looking at it. He thought he saw disappointment in Schinkel’s ugly, kindly face at this indication that he himself should have no knowledge—present and relieving at least—of its contents; but he liked that better than his pretending to attribute to it again some silly comfortable sense. Schinkel had now the shrewdness or the good taste not to repeat that remark, and as the letter pressed against his heart Hyacinth felt it still more distinctly, not as a vain balm to apprehension, but as the very penetration of a fatal knife.