“Well?” There came a wide shrug of the shoulders, a loosening of the lips. “I got back somehow. I seemed to be riding, day and night, straight to Hell. But eventually I got to Salisbury and took a train to Beira. It was immensely steadying to take a train. I think any more of the veldt would have driven me quite definitely mad.” He stopped; then, in a moment, jerked out: “That’s all.” “Do you mean that you’ve never heard anything more?” “Never a word. But I know that, eventually, she drew out every penny of her letter of credit. She had hardly dipped into it when we left Europe.” “Good God!” I don’t know why I should have sat stolidly through the rest and have been bowled over by that one detail, but I was. It made the woman extraordinarily real. “And of course she knows several places where a letter would reach me, if she ever had reason to write,” he went on. “Perhaps you see now why I have to hang on. By holding my tongue, I’ve been grub-staking them in Arcadia, you might say--but, damn it, I know so little about it! The time might come....” “Why haven’t you divorced her long since?” His face hardened. “Didn’t I mention that she was a Catholic? We were married by the most orthodox _padre_ imaginable. There’s no divorce for her. She’s the kind to chuck Heaven, perhaps, but not her church. And, unfortunately”--he spoke very slowly and meditatively--“our marriage, you see, just missed being the kind that can be annulled. ‘Unfortunately,’ I say, but, even now, I’m glad--damned glad. It’s quite on the cards, you know, that some day some priest may send her back to me. I might divorce; she couldn’t. So it seems decent for me not to.” “Well, of all the--” I got no further. The whole Laokoönesque group had now completed itself before me. Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from _Rigoletto_. Then: “Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I have to hang on, don’t you?” I merely compressed my lips tightly, that no word should come. “After all,” he said, turning his head away, “I should like a chance to get back at Romance, some day. And the time may come--what with spectrum analysis and all.” I shook my head. “You love the woman still, Chalmers.” “Not I.” His head-shake was more vehement than mine. “But I want to be on deck if anything should turn up. I want to see it through. At least--I can’t quite see that I’ve the right to go out.” I sighed. Chalmers had always gone his own way; and certainly in this greatest matter he would be tenacious, if ever. He seemed for the moment to have forgotten me, and sat once more, his arms folded on the table, his shoulders hunched, as beneath a burden, in the speckled brown coat, his head moving slightly from side to side--again fantastically like the tortoise that bears up the world. I didn’t quite know what to do with him.