ntervened!
A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken
men's disgusting folly. Her power had been proved in two instances
already--the beastly innkeeper, and that man with moustaches, upon whom
Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching in his pocket, glared more in
repulsion than in anger. The very object of the expedition was lost from
view in his sudden and overwhelming sense of utter insecurity. And
this made Mr. Jones feel very savage; but not against the man with the
moustaches. Thus, while Heyst was really feeling that his life was
not worth two minutes, purchase, he heard himself addressed with
no affection of languid impertinence but with a burst of feverish
determination.

"Here! Let's call a truce!" said Mr. Jones.

Heyst's heart was too sick to allow him to smile.

"Have I been making war on you?" he asked wearily. "How do you expect
me to attach any meaning to your words?" he went on. "You seem to be a
morbid, senseless sort of bandit. We don't speak the same language. If I
were to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn't believe
me, because you would not understand me. It certainly isn't the love
of life, from which I have divorced myself long ago--not sufficiently,
perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that it
has never been in danger from me. I am unarmed."

Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation. It was only
towards the last that he looked at Heyst.

"Unarmed, eh?" Then he burst out violently: "I tell you, a gentleman is
no match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of the brutes.
Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature is of the commonest sort. You
could hardly have got her out of a drawing-room. Though they're all
alike, for that matter. Unarmed! It's a pity. I am in much greater
danger than you are or were--or I am much mistaken. But I am not--I know
my man!"

He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill
exclamations. To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone
before.

"On the track! On the scent!" he cried, forgetting himself to the point
of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.

Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string.
It became quiet suddenly.

"I might have smelt a rat! I always knew that this would be the danger."
He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, f