Chalmers ruffled both hands through his hair and leaned back from the table. His mouth took on a legal twist. “It’s the only thing I blame myself for--bar all the egotism that youth has to slough, and that I think I sloughed forever before I reached the damned coast. I ought to have known that half her impulse was the mere clinging of the frightened child, and the other half the strangeness of our journey, which made us both feel that all laws had ceased to work and that all signs had failed. I ought to have reflected, to have put her off, to have made sure, before I ever took her into my arms. And yet I’m glad I didn’t--though I’m ashamed of being glad. Even then, you know, I didn’t envisage the rest of life. I still thought, as for months I had thought, that there could be no conventional future for that adventure. When my curious _wanderjahr_ was over, I expected to die. And I wanted to have some other face than the barren visage of Romance--the painted hussy!--press itself to mine before I went out. I got it; and I’m not yet over being glad, though it has made a coil that grows tighter rather than looser with the years.” I made no answer. There was nothing to say. He had not got to the end, and until the end what was there for me to do but light another weary cigarette, and summon all the sympathy I could to my non-committal eyes? On the face of it, it was merely an extraordinary situation in which, if a man were once caught, he could do little--a new and singular kind of hard-luck story. But, as he told it, with those tones, those inflections, those stresses, he certainly did not seem to be painting himself _en beau_. I looked at the patient figure opposite me--Chalmers always seemed pre-eminently patient--and, for very perplexity, held my tongue. “The next morning, I got breakfast early and went to see about my men and beasts. I was a little afraid of finding the men drunk, but they weren’t--only full-fed and lazy and half mutinous. The guide who had led us to the historic spot had vanished--deserted in the night, with half his pay owing him. No one in that black crew could explain. We had had desertions before, and I should have considered us well enough off simply with one coast nigger the less, if he hadn’t been my interpreter as well. There were very few things I could say to the others without him, and, though we were out of the woods, we were by no means done with our retinue. I strode back to the house in a fine rage. I think I minded the inconvenience most, since it would be the inconvenience that would most affect her. Frankly, you see, I couldn’t suppose she felt, any longer, a special concern with that particular black sample of human disloyalty.