“It happens to be the only yellow-backed book on the shelf. To say nothing of the purple dragon, which is grossly incorrect and unmeaning. It jumps to the eyes. Just as my going to China ought to have jumped to the eyes of everybody.” “I’m afraid it didn’t. Perhaps we were too much paralysed with dismay.” “I often tried to guess what you all thought about it,” said Baltazar. “A human being can’t escape his little vanities. It was like being dead and wondering what the dickens people were saying about one.” “We didn’t know what to say,” replied Sheepshanks. “We had no precedents on which to base any conclusions. We looked for motives for flight and we could find none. We sought for possible imperative objectives, and one so apparently uncompelling as China never occurred to us. Here to-day, gone to-morrow. You vanished, ‘like a snowflake on a river.’ To see you now, after all these years, looking scarcely a day older, is an experience which I must confess is bewildering.” “I suppose you thought me mad or a fugitive from justice, or one driven by the Furies.” “We didn’t know what to think, and that’s the truth of it,” replied Sheepshanks. “Well, call it the last. I wasn’t very old and hardened. Perhaps I mistook Mrs. Grundy with an upraised umbrella for one of the ladies who played the devil with Orestes and Company. I had quite decent reasons then for clearing out. Whether I was wise or not is another matter. Anyhow I cleared, sank my identity and went out to China. After eighteen years I came back. The rest I’ve told you in a sort of pemmican form.” “I don’t deny,” said Sheepshanks, “that I am still somewhat confused.” “All right,” said Baltazar. “You sit there, and I’ll tell you what I can. Anyhow, I’ll try to explain why I’m here. I’ll begin from the day I sailed for China.” The primness of Edgar Sheepshanks,D.SC., relaxed, to some extent, during Baltazar’s story. Like Dominie Sampson’s “Prodigious!” his “Wonderful! wonderful!” punctuated the intervals. To him who had stuck limpet-like to the same academic walls, Baltazar appeared a veritable modern Ulysses. He sighed, wishing that he too had performed the scholarly travels through that far land of Mystery, the Cathay of ancient times, which was now the little better known interior of modern China; he sighed, as he did when gallant youth returned from high adventure in that land of equal mystery, the Front. Baltazar was half through his tale when there entered a venerable man-servant, Sheepshanks’s gyp for innumerable years. At the sight of the guest he started back with the dropped jaw of one who sees a ghost. “Mr. Baltazar!” “Lord, it’s Punter!” It was odd how names came back from the moss-grown recesses of memory. He shook hands with the old man.