on the
second floor of the Consulate, a magnificent chamber whose windows
opened upon balconies and revealed, above the opposite roofs, rectangles
of luminous twilight. Some half-dozen gentlemen were seated on chairs in
the dusk about one of the balconies. As the newcomers arrived by a side
door a servant came in through the enormous curtains at the far end
bearing a couple of many-branched candlesticks and advanced towards a
table, thus revealing in some degree the elaborate design and shabby
neglect of the place. Huge divans in scarlet satin were ripped and
battered, the gilding of the sconces was tarnished and blackened, and
the parquetry flooring, of intricate design, was warped and loose under
the advancing foot. And above their heads, like shadowy wraiths, hung
immense candelabra whose lustres glittered mysteriously in the
candlelight under their coverings of dusty muslin.

Mr. Marsh was leaning his elbows on the balcony railing and facing his
audience as he explained his conviction that the captain had intended to
keep him out.

"I assure you," he was saying, and apparently he was directing his
remarks at someone who now heard the tale for the first time; "I assure
you, when I pushed the door and saw the man's shoulder, it moved. I mean
it actually quivered, apart from my movement of the door. It gave me a
very peculiar sensation, because when I spoke, there was no answer. Only
a quiver. And another thing. When I finally did shove the door open and
so shoved the captain over, the noise was not the noise of a dead inert
body, if you understand me. Not at all. It sounded as though he had
broken his fall somewhat! I can assure you----"

Mr. Marsh had enjoyed an excellent education in England. He had the
average Englishman's faculty of expressing himself in excellent
commonplaces so that every other Englishman knew exactly what he meant.
But his hearers on this occasion were not all Englishmen, and suddenly
out of the dusk of the corner came a voice speaking English but not of
England at all. Mr. Spokesly, standing a short distance off, was
startled at the full-throated brazen clang of it booming through the
obscurity of the vast chamber. It was a voice eloquent of youth and
impudent virile good-humour, a voice with a strange harsh under-twang
which the speaker's ancestors had brought out of central Asia, where
they had bawled barbaric war-songs across the frozen spaces.

"Broke his what? I don't understand what