"I thought you must have gone out somewhere, and was leaving you a note," he explained--and then, at my inquiring look, with a flash of his brazen impudence; "just to thank you for having been a good fellow, Ronnie--and a very good hand at staging a play, too!" That was the only reference he made, then or ever, to what had gone--and with a sneer underlying it! which I had certainly answered but for the evident hopelessness that had let it out. I was angry at his morose resignation, at the weariness on his face--an ingrate if ever there was one, who thought life was treating him badly! Whereas, God knows, he had never ceased to buffet it into being his enemy. He ought to have been grateful for knowing Iris at all.... Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm going abroad, Mexico way, and I don't suppose you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie--in fact, there's no earthly reason why you should ever see me again." And to his suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on the glimmer of a really grateful smile; very like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to a long good-bye.... And so Red Antony went away, leaving behind him nothing in England but a question now and then in Iris and myself as to where exactly he might be and what he might be doing. And as I had often wondered why he hadn't left England long before, I never doubted but that now he had taken the step he would keep his distance--a contemptuous distance, mark you!--from it. For what, after all, was there for him to come back to? About a month after he had gone Iris and Roger were married. I was the best man. IV That was two years before. And there I am, on that night two years later, still in that taxi and running up an unconscionably high fare towards Roger Poole's house in Regent's Park; and Antony back again in England.... The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state; which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have developed our emotions to a more, well, civilised plane than that of mere constancy; an Armenian I know once told me that his father and mother had loved each other for fifty years, but I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't one more of those exaggerations for which oppressed peoples are remarkable, so it must be almost unbelievable that a normal kind of man could still be in a feverish state about a woman for so long a time--and with, to be frank, so little for his trouble.