Only the ceiling light burnt in the little restaurant, which but for ourselves was deserted. The stranger leant over towards me, and a shiver passed over me at the nearness of this man whom I did not know, and to whose extraordinary experience I had, so to speak, by my own doing, been made a party. I wanted to put an end to it now, I wanted to say, "Yes, I have been very much interested. Thank you very much for telling me," and then to get up and go away. But at my first movement he detained me. "Listen a little longer. I'm not mad, you know, and you needn't be afraid that I shall ever bother you afterwards. You don't know what good this has done me. I've been alone with this thing for a fortnight, nearly, thinking about it. The storm.... It lasted for two days; that made four days since I had been on the buoy. I think another day of storm would have killed me, There wasn't much life left in me by the time the sea began to go down. Two days of storm...." His voice trailed away. I think he felt, as I did, that the moment was over when he had really held all my attention and all my imagination. It was no good trying to revive it. I was tired, as though I had lived through some brief but violent mental stress. "Two days of storm," he muttered vaguely. "And how did you get away?" I asked; it was a perfunctory question. "How did I get away.--Oh.--Yes, of course. A ship, on the seventh day. Yes, there were three days of calm after the storm; comparative calm, but for the swell. So I had the week he had intended for me to have, to the full. The ship's carpenter came alongside in a dinghy, and filed through one of the bars. I never told them how I came to be there. I said it was for a bet, and that I was to have been fetched by my friends the next day. When I got on board I collapsed. I'd just come out of hospital the day you first saw me here." He rose wearily. "Well, I mustn't keep you. Thank you more than I can say, for having listened." It seemed strange that _he_ should be thanking _me_. We walked towards the door of the restaurant together; outside, the London street was empty under a melancholy drizzle of rain. "You had better give me your name and your address," I said, pricked on to it by a curiously conventional conscience. "No, no," he said, backing away from me. "You've been kind, you mustn't ever be implicated." "Why, what are you going to do?" I cried. He turned, his old wideawake crammed down over his hair, and his face half buried in the upturned collar of his coat, but I saw the sudden gleam of his eyes by the light of a street lamp. "Think out something worse to do to him," he mumbled rapidly; "something worse to do to _him_." * * * * * As he read the last words M. Lesueur's brow darkened. A mare's nest indeed! An hour gone and nothing gained! Then his eye caught a footnote to the last page of the translation he had just perused.