and my
home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not
save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt
before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a
hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my
own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about
in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead
upstairs.

I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in
that stripped my soul bare.

It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the
house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men's
dinner--"A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he invited me;
"everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven
knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was
accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a
memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not
been altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild
amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two
university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the
artist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and another
prominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille
had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for
Monckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, with
duologues, but the conversation was already becoming general--so far as
such a long table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.

It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning
rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek
forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had
sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the
table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.

"Something must be burning," said Panmure.

Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just see,
will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.

Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the
siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed
upon that, is just one of those d