The clock, striking nine from the tall Italian campanile on which some past bureaucrat had spent money that might have been better used, warned him that if he was to write that evening he must do it at once; but it warned him also that it was time he went to his mother's. Should he, should he not? It was no sense of duty which decided him. It was the remembrance that if he went back to his lodging, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could not only write the warning, but also put a certain small rose-scented, rose-satin-covered boxlet and a paper of corn in his pocket, in case Naraini, poor little soul, needed comforting. Something that was not Eastern or Western, but simply human, surged up in him as he thought of what her face would be when he proved to her that, so far from being angry at her throwing the corn into the gutter, he had gathered it up--every grain! He had not told his mother that he had done so; that is not the sort of information sons give their mothers, East or West. But he meant to tell Naraini! He ran up the brick stairs which led from outside to the upper story lightly as a boy, feeling a sort of exultation in his new freedom of circumstance. He had purposely brought no servant with him, for _they_, he knew, would have brought Shark Lane with _them_, and he wished to forget its ways and works for a time. So he had determined to engage a new and uncontaminated attendant on the morrow. One consequence of this, however, was that his room was dark to-day! He stood on its threshold feeling, of a sudden, strangely forlorn and lost. Then he pulled himself together sharply. What a trivial thing is man, that even the lack of a bedroom candle should discourage him! On the threshold, too, of a new life! Especially when he had not so far forsaken civilisation as to be without wax vestas! He lit one after another, laboriously, and managed by their light to scrawl a short note to Jack Raymond. Then he rummaged in his portmanteau for the rose-scented box, trusting more to touch and smell than sight, until, having found it, he laid it beside him on the floor in order to relock the portmanteau, ere leaving the room to take care of itself. And then? Then a travelling-inkstand and the little casket got mixed up in the darkness, and he became conscious of something wet on his hands. He swore--in English--and lit another match. The rose-coloured box was uninjured, but his fingers were hopeless. He turned naturally to soap, water, towels; and found none. There was the well in the compound, of course, but--he swore again. Then, half inclined to laugh half to frown, at the annoyance he felt, he began to feel his way towards the stairs. As he did so, a chink of light at the bottom of a door, farther down the wider roof of the lower story from which the upper rooms rose, arrested him. He might beg for a wash there. A voice answered his knock. He opened the door and went in; then stood petrified.