Returning from the hotel with my suit-case and bag—the same with which I had landed from the _Auvergne_—I heard a man’s voice in the drawing-room up-stairs. The deep, soft tones told me it was not Wolf’s. "Mrs. ’Arrowby said as you was to go right up, sir," Boosey informed me, relieving me of my bags. "I ’ear as you was a prisoner in Germany, sir," he continued, while making his way to the coat-closet with my coat. "That’s why I didn’t know as it ’d be you when you come this afternoon. Might I ask, sir, if they throwed beer in your face, or anything like that?" With one foot on the stairs I looked after the waddling figure retreating down the hall. "Who told you that I was a prisoner?" "Mr. Wolf’s man, sir; but"—I am sure there was a veiled taunt in what followed—-"but if you wasn’t, sir, or if it’s a secret—" I lost the rest as he became engulfed in the closet, but I had heard enough. Wolf had taken his own way to protect the honor of the family. It was not easy to enter the drawing-room and face one of Vio’s friends; but it was the sort of thing to which I must learn to steel myself. Moreover, it might be one of my own friends come to welcome me back. Vio had informed me that Wolf had taken steps to keep any mention of my "discovery" and return out of the papers; but we were too well known in Boston not to have the word passed privately. To any friend’s welcome there would be unspoken reserves; but that I must take for granted and become accustomed to. But, as it happened, it was not a friend of mine; it was the colonel of the photograph, who had apparently dropped in for a cup of tea—and something more. What that something more might be I could only surmise from Vio’s way of saying, "Here’s Mr. Harrowby now." They had seemingly discussed me, it had seemingly been necessary for them to discuss me, and taken a definite attitude toward me. That my wife should do this with a man who was a stranger to me, that the circumstances should be such that it was a duty for them to do it, was the extraordinary cup of gall given me to drain. I drained it while Vio went on, with that ease which no one knew better than I to be sustained on nerve: "Billy, I want you to know Colonel Stroud. He’s just got back from France, and has been explaining to me how the Allies are to occupy the Rhineland. Our men are already reaching Mayence and Coblenz, and he has heard, too, that the President arrived this morning at Brest. I suppose it will be in the evening papers." So we were launched in talk that couldn’t hurt any one; and if my feelings were wounded it was only by drawing conclusions. They were the easier to draw from the fact, as I guessed, that Vio directed the talk in such a way that I could read between the lines.