Baltazar laughed as he turned to deposit hat and stick on a side-table; then he came and clapped both his hands on the elderly don’s lean shoulders. “You apostle of primness! Aren’t you glad to see me?” “Of course I’m glad, my dear fellow. Exceedingly glad. But your sudden resurrection rather takes one’s breath away.” He smiled. “Let us both sit down, and you can tell me all about it.” CHAPTER XI IF I don’t smoke, I’m afraid I can’t talk,” said Baltazar. Sheepshanks smiled politely. “You remember my little weakness? But pray smoke. I’ve got used to it of late years. Times change, and we with them.” Baltazar filled and lit his pipe. “A couple of weeks ago,” said he, “I had all but complete two epoch-marking mathematical treatises. I had got systems and results you good people here had never dreamed of. I had also stuff in the way of Chinese scholarship that would have been a revelation to the Western world. Then German aircraft dropped bombs on my house, a hermitage in the middle of a moorland, and wiped out the labour of a lifetime. They also nearly killed a young Chinaman whom I regard as an extraordinary mathematical genius and about whom I want to consult you. They also, thereby, revealed to me a fact of which I was entirely unaware, namely, that the war had been going on for a couple of years.” He leaned back in his chair and drew a few contented puffs. His host passed a hand over perplexed brows and leaned forward. “I’m very sorry,” said he, in his precise, nasal voice, “to appear stupid. But you have put forward half a dozen such amazing propositions in one breath that I can’t quite follow you.” A smile gleamed in Baltazar’s eyes. “I thought that would get you,” he remarked placidly. “But it’s an accurate presentment of my present position.” “No doubt, no doubt,” said Sheepshanks. “But you surely haven’t been living a recluse on a moor for the last twenty years?” “Oh no,” replied Baltazar. “Eighteen of them I spent in China. I went out straight from here.” “To China? Dear me,” said Sheepshanks. “What an extraordinary place to go to from Cambridge.” “Didn’t anybody guess where I had vanished to?” “Not a soul, I assure you. Your disappearance created a sensation. Quite a sensation. A painful one, because you were a man we could ill afford to lose.” “It’s good of you to say so. But it’s odd that no one seemed to be interested enough in me to reason out China. You all knew I was keen on Chinese.” He cast a swift glance around the bookshelves that lined the room, and shot out an arm. “I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s my little handbook—_Introduction to the Language, on a Scientific Basis_.” Sheepshanks’ myopic vision followed Baltazar’s pointing finger. “Yes. It’s somewhere there. You haven’t changed much from the creature of flashes that you used to be.”