and
settled down here, and remained twenty years in all, and yet nothing had
happened. Yes, on the alert for twenty years to detect romantic
developments--he had a daughter sixteen years old--and until that ship
came in, not a chance! So he described it to his friends at Costi's and
at the Austrian Consulate, an immense villa in a charming garden farther
along in the Rue Parallel.

For somehow the arrival of that ship was a significant event in more
than the accepted sense. It was reserved for Mr. Marsh to perceive the
full romantic aspect of the adventure. For others it was a nine-day
wonder, an official nuisance or blessing, as suited the official
temperament to regard it. To Mr. Spokesly it was an exciting but
secondary factor leading up to the greater adventure of departure. It
was over-shadowed by the more perplexing problem of explaining himself
in a masterless vessel.

But Mr. Marsh, after twenty years, during which he had failed to detect
anything resembling romance in his life, when he was called out of his
bed at dawn that morning to go off as interpreter, saw the matter in a
very different light. Indeed he saw it in the light of romance. His
first comment when he found time to review his experiences was: "By
Jove, you can't beat that type! We shall always rule, always!" and his
bosom swelled at the thought of England. But it was his discovery of
Captain Rannie which remained with him as the great scene in the play.
He could not get it out of his mind. He told everybody about it. He
revealed a doubt whether other people fully appreciated the
extraordinary experience which had been his when he went down that dark
curving stairway, "not having the faintest notion, you know, whether I
wouldn't get knocked on the head or perhaps blown to bits," and found
the door resisting his efforts. An active intelligent resistance! he
declared, precisely as though the man were trying to keep him out. And
as time passed and the story developed in his own mind by the simple
process of continually repeating and brooding upon it, as an actor's
part becomes clearer to him by rendition, Mr. Marsh developed the theory
that when he first went down those stairs and tried to get in, the
resistance was in truth intelligent and alive.

He was explaining this new and intriguing "theory," as he called it, on
the following evening when Mr. Spokesly accompanied by the husband of
Esther, who was "in the Public Debt," entered the great room