we were sitting at the
table, pledging each other in well-cooled champagne; and it was not long
after this that not only the negro who waited on us was plainly reveling
in John's remarks, but also the cook, with her bandannaed ebony head
poked round the corner of the kitchen door, was doing her utmost to lose
no word of this entertainment. For John, taking up the young and the
old, the quick and the dead, of masculine Kings Port, proceeded to
narrate their private exploits, until by coffee-time he had unrolled for
me the richest tapestry of gayeties that I remember, and I sat without
breath, tearful and aching, while the two negroes had retired far into
the kitchen to muffle their emotions.

"Tom, oh Tom! you Tom!" called John Mayrant; and after the man had come
from the kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table,
and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he
continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years
of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused
at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he
appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his
version of a saying which is considered by some people an improvement on
the original, 'Cherchez la femme.' Uncle Marston had it, 'Hunt the other
woman.' Don't go too fast with that punch; it isn't as gentle as it
seems."

But John and his Uncle Marston had between them given me my beginning,
and, as I sat sipping my punch, I ceased to hear the anecdotes which
followed. I sat sipping and smoking, and was presently aware of the
deepening silence of the night, and of John no longer at the table, but
by the window, looking out into the forest, and muttering once more,
"Oh, the times, the times!"

"It's always a triangle," I began.

He turned round from his window. "Triangle?" He looked at my glass of
punch, and then at me. "Go easy with the Bombo," he repeated.

"Bombo?" I echoed. "You call this Bombo? You don't know how remarkable
that is, but that's because you don't know Aunt Carola, who is very
remarkable, too. Well, never mind her now. Point is, it's always a
triangle."

"I haven't a doubt of it," he replied.

"There you're right. And so was your uncle. He knew. Triangle." Here I
found myself nodding portentously at John, and beating the table with my
finger very solemnly.

He stood by his window seeming to wait for me. And now ever