“Well, I won’t bore you with too many details. She pulled herself together and said her visit must end. We did not tell the C.’s. We merely let them get off to Tunis. It would not have been easy for her to explain to Madame C. all the things that we had never condescended to explain to each other. She was a Catholic, by the way. We were married by a parish priest in--no, on second thoughts, I won’t even tell you where. The place has kept the secret hitherto. It is better so. I left her at once to make arrangements for the quest. It took some time and a good deal of frenzied journeying to realize on my securities. I gave her a letter of credit, so that she could be in all incidental ways independent of me. That was necessary, because I was to go out to Mozambique first, and she was to follow only when I sent for her. Very soon, you see, I began to realize the practical inconveniences of travelling with a woman who bears your name and who is a total stranger to you. It’s damned expensive, for one thing.” Chalmers’s smile was nearer the authentic gleam of irony than anything I had seen before during the evening. “Well, I went. I interviewed the proper people; I saw one of the creatures who knew the spot where our man had died. Eventually I arranged the expedition. Then I cabled for her. She took the _Dunvegan Castle_ at Naples. By the time I met her at the steamer, she had grown incredible to me. I could more easily have believed her a sharer in some half-forgotten light adventure than my duly registered wife. She was unreal to me, a figure recurring inexplicably in a dream, a memory--of exactly what sort I was not quite sure. My feet lagged along the pier.... She soon set all that straight. I had wondered if the sop to Cerberus would require our seeming to kiss. She managed it somehow so that no stage kiss was necessary. She dissipated the funk into which I had fallen, by practical questions and preoccupations; she came upon my fever like a cool breeze off the sea. She had made her point; she had achieved her miracle; and in every incidental way, little and big, she could afford to show what a serviceable soul she was. She was a good thing to have about. There were times when the situation got on my nerves, in Mozambique, before we started. It’s such a small hole that we seemed always to be bumping into each other. I couldn’t make out her private attitude towards me; I used to wonder if she had any, or if she simply thought of me as a courier in her own class. I was so endlessly occupied with engaging men and beasts and camping kit and supplies--what was I but a courier? The paladin idea was fading a little; though now and then, at night, I’d look up at the Southern Cross and let the strangeness of the thing convince me all over again. I don’t think I wanted anything so commonplace as gratitude from her; but I did want in her some sense of the strangeness of our alliance, with all the things it left unsaid.