d the service. Only once, when she
ordered a bowl of flowers removed from the table, did their mistress
address either of them. Conversation after the first few amenities
speedily became almost a monologue. One man talked whilst the others
listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch. He possessed the
rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a few phrases to the
strange places of which he spoke, of bringing the very thrill of strange
happenings into the shadowy room. It seemed that there was scarcely a
country of the world which he had not visited, a country, that is to
say, where men congregate, for he admitted from the first that he was a
city worshipper, that the empty places possessed no charm for him.

"I am not even a sportsman," he confessed once, half apologetically, in
reply to a question from his guest. "I have passed down the great rivers
of the world without a thought of salmon, and I have driven through the
forest lands and across the mountains behind a giant locomotive, without
a thought of the beasts which might be lurking there, waiting to be
killed. My only desire has been to reach the next place where men and
women were."

"Irrespective of nationality?" Francis queried.

"Absolutely. I have never minded much of what race--I have the trick
of tongues rather strangely developed--but I like the feeling of human
beings around me. I like the smell and sound and atmosphere of a great
city. Then all my senses are awake, but life becomes almost turgid in my
veins during the dreary hours of passing from one place to another."

"Do you rule out scenery as well as sport from amongst the joys of
travel?" Francis enquired.

"I am ashamed to make such a confession," his host answered, "but I
have never lingered for a single unnecessary moment to look at the most
wonderful landscape in the world. On the other hand, I have lounged for
hours in the narrowest streets of Pekin, in the markets of Shanghai,
along Broadway in New York, on the boulevards in Paris, outside the
Auditorium in Chicago. These are the obvious places where humanity
presses the thickest, but I know of others. Some day we will talk of
them."

Francis, too, although that evening, through sheer lack of sympathy,
he refused to admit it, shared to some extent Hilditch's passionate
interest in his fellow-creatures, and notwithstanding the strange
confusion of thought into which he had been thrown during the last
twenty-four hours, he