of
a smitten bell. Customers were turning up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging
Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him, to say nothing to
anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut short.
Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his
beard combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked
with suspicion at Davidson, and even glanced at his wife; but he was
baffled by the natural placidity of the one and the acquired habit of
immobility in the other.

"Have you sent out the drinks?" he asked surlily.

She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with
a loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted
the customers outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking
half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still there when
Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go. At the noise
he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his hat to Mrs.
Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin, and
then looked away. He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the
door, deep in his simplicity.

"I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence," he
said. "My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now
is to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear something there, I
don't doubt."

"Make inquiries of the devil!" replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.

Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to
make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard
something more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view. It was
a shrewd try. It was successful in a rather startling way, because the
hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly abusive. All of a sudden, in
the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call Heyst many names, of
which "pig-dog" was not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually
choked himself. Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament
could withstand worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:

"It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with
your cash-box--"

The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
Davidson's.

"My cash-box! My--he--look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with a
girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me."

He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what the