Mr Bethany blinked and listened. He tried for the twentieth time to judge his friend’s eyes, to gain as best he could some sustained and unobserved glance at this baffling face. ‘Where is your precious French book?’ he said irritably. ‘It’s upstairs.’ ‘Fire away, then!’ Lawford rose and glanced about the room. ‘What, no light there either?’ snapped Mr Bethany. ‘Take this; _I_ don’t mind the dark. There’ll be plenty of that for me soon.’ Lawford hesitated at the door, looking rather strangely back. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there are matches upstairs.’ He shut the door after him. The darkness seemed cold and still as water. He went slowly up, with eyes fixed wide on the floating luminous gloom, and out of memory seemed to gather, as faintly as in the darkness which they had exorcised for him, the strange pitiful eyes of the night before. And as he mounted a chill, terrible, physical peace seemed to steal over him. Mr Bethany was sitting as he had left him, looking steadily on the floor, when Lawford returned. He flattened out the book on the table with a sniff of impatience. And dragging the candle nearer, and stooping his nose close to the fusty print, he began to read. ‘Was this in the house?’ he inquired presently. ‘No,’ said Lawford; ‘it was lent to me by a friend—Herbert.’ ‘H’m! don’t know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is. This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of clap-trap eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off, apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau, with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix on this for your holiday reading?’ ‘Sabathier’s alive, isn’t he?’ ‘I never said he wasn’t. He’s a good deal too much alive for my old wits, with his Mam’selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough, perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.’ ‘Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?’ Mr Bethany peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. ‘I should say decidedly that the fellow was a _very_ rare character, so long as by rare you don’t mean good. It’s one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he’s different from the rest of us. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.’ ‘There’s a portrait of him a few pages back.’