At the same time, my curiosity was aroused. There had never been any mystery about Chalmers. There isn’t any about a tortoise, if it comes to that. The beast has been made much of mythologically, I believe; but even in India they only accuse him of holding up the world. No one pretends, so far as I know, that he keeps anything under his shell except himself. But Chalmers didn’t seem to be even bearing a burden. He was simply Chalmers. He had come among us, an accredited student of physics, with letters of introduction from German professors and Colonial Dames; he had performed the absolutely necessary conventional duties; he was vaguely related to people that every one knew; he was so obviously a gentleman that no one would ever have thought of affirming it. His holidays were all accounted for--in fact, he usually spent them with one or another of our own group. There wasn’t--there isn’t now--a single thing about Chalmers that any one could have the instinct to investigate. It had never occurred to any of us that we didn’t know as much about Chalmers as we did about the people we had been brought up with. We happened not to have been brought up with him, because he had happened to be brought up abroad. His father had been a consul somewhere. On this occasion, anyhow, my curiosity got the better of my fixed rule. I decided to lead Chalmers on. “Do you mean to say that your noble industry is nothing but a poor substitute for a drug?” He smiled quaintly. His green eyes shone under his dark eyelashes. Very taking eyes they were: well set in his head and pleasantly intimate, with a near-sighted brilliancy. “I didn’t say it was a poor substitute. And, anyhow, cocaine might charm away the hours, but only work can charm away the years. I’ve got into my stride--for eternity, it would seem. And some day, you know, I may, quite incidentally, do something in spectrum analysis that will be significant. I’ve got all the time in the world.” “Are you so sure?” “Well--it looks as if I were in for a long wait.” He spoke as unconcernedly as if he had his lease of life locked up in his safe-deposit drawer. I drank some whiskey and waited a minute, wondering whether to push his confidence over the edge, send it spinning into an abyss of revelation. Finally, I decided. “I didn’t know that anything but a contract with the devil could make you so sure.” “Oh, it doesn’t have to be with the devil.” He sipped his virtuous apollinaris. “Did you notice the heroine’s sister?” he went on. I hadn’t noticed her much. I had been paying my money to see Maude Lansing act, and my frugal eyes had attached themselves to her exclusively, from the first act to the last. “A vague little blonde thing, wasn’t she?”