Lodz, fighting at
Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria,
the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the
Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize
it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling
strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things
were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new
sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder
that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some
entirely disconnected affair.

They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men
with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and
guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero
always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make
excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned
Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about
Prothero his nescience was profound.

One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
alarmed.

"Moscow is a late place," said Benham's student friend. "You need not
be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite
time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand."

When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
sleepy and irritable.

"I don't trouble if YOU are late," said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. "I wasn't born yesterday."

"I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow."

"I don't want to leave Moscow."

"But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now."

"I want to stay in Moscow."

Benham looked baffled.

Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
"I don't want to leave Moscow," he said, "and I'm not going to do so."

"But haven't we done--"

Prothero interrupted. "You may. But I haven't. We're not after the
same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've
found--different things."

His expression was extraordinarily defiant.

"I want," he went on, "to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
t