His house was in disorder: holland sheets covered most of the furniture, his valuables had been removed to the bank, and his heavy baggage already stood roped and corded for the journey which he had set himself. He intended travelling across the Trans-Siberian Railway, and sending his trunks on to Shanghai to a trusted agent. The tickets necessary for the journey were in his desk, and his sleeping berth had been booked for some weeks past. This thought made the old man pause: it might be three weeks or a month before he could bring Talham to trial, even supposing that he persuaded the Public Prosecutor to act, and a month was a long time. He decided to sleep on it before taking any further action. Half-way through dinner, Gregory de Costa paid him an unexpected visit. For two weeks Gregory had seldom been at home except to sleep, and that night, as the old man knew, he had an engagement to dine with a party at a fashionable West End restaurant. “Hullo!” said the old man, not unkindly. “What has happened to you?” The young man sank listlessly into a chair by the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just sick of things--that’s all!” “After dining with Soumerez?” Gregory shook his head. “No,” he said, “Soumerez bores me, and I don’t feel that I could sit down to dinner at the same table to-night.” There was a little silence, then the young man asked: “What do you want me to do whilst you’re away?” “Do!” replied his father. “Why, do what you’ve been doing for the last year or two--just fool around London. I have taken a flat for you in Jermyn Street.” The young man played with a salt-cellar moodily. “I’d rather go with you,” he said. “That’s impossible,” said De Costa hurriedly. “I’ve got to go into a country where all sorts of privations and discomforts have to be encountered, and you’re not fit for it. You’re a young man, I know,” he said gently, “but I’ve had the life; I have lived in most of these wild places, and my present position is due to the fact. In my young days I undertook certain risks and underwent certain hardships. I have no wish that you should have any of the experiences which were mine as a young man.” Gregory looked at his father curiously. “I suppose you had a pretty rotten life, didn’t you, when you were young?” Raymond replied with a nod of his head. His son had chosen an appropriate word, for “rotten” indeed was the life De Costa had lived. There was not an unsavoury transaction in the Philippines or in the far-away trading-places of Asia with which he had not been associated. He had financed more purely illegal schemes, had been behind more piratical expeditions, and had been associated with more heartless villainy than any other of his kind. Not even the bad old traders of the South Sea Islands could show such a record as his, and even the sanctified odour of Kensington had not altogether dispersed the sinister atmosphere of his early days.