impossible for him ever to disappoint anyone. He had
hoped for a quiet evening, when he might expect to get to bed early and
have time to think over every tiny detail of his time in the Mangadone
Bazaar; but as this was not possible, he agreed with sufficient alacrity
to deceive his kind host.

His face was drawn and tired, and his eyes were heavy; he noticed this
as he glanced into his glass, but after all it did not matter. His
social importance was small, and for to-night he was nothing more than
an adjunct of Hartley, a mere postscript put in out of formal
politeness. He was not going in order to please Mrs. Wilder--though, as
she appeared on his mental list of names, she had her place in the
structure that filled his mind--but to please Hartley. Any time would
have done for Mrs. Wilder, she was but a cypher in the total, but if he
had begged off to-night he would have had to hurt Hartley. Coryndon
could never get away from the other man's point of view; it dogged him
in great things and in small, and he was obliged to realize Hartley's
pleasure in seeing him, and his further pleasure in carrying him off to
a house where he himself enjoyed life thoroughly. Coryndon could as
easily have disappointed a child, or been cruel to a small, wagging
puppy as to Hartley in his present mood.

He knew that he would have to shut the door upon his dominating thought,
unless something occurred to open it during the evening. Women liked to
play with fire, and he wondered if Mrs. Wilder would show any
inclination to fiddle with gunpowder, but he hardly expected that she
would, though she had played some part in the extensive drama that
reached from Heath's bungalow to the Colonnade in the Chinese quarter,
leaving a gap between that his brain struggled with in vain.

It was like the imaginable space between life and death, where both
conditions existed, and one was the key to the other. Something was
lacking. One small master touch wanting to lay the whole thing bare of
mystery. Coryndon's weary eyes reflected the state of his mind. He felt
like an inventor who is baffled for the lack of a tiny clue that makes
the impossible natural and easy, or a composer who hears a refrain and
cannot call it into birth in clear defiant chords. To think too much
when thought cannot carry the mind over the limiting barrier is to spend
substance on fruitless effort, and Coryndon deliberately shut the door
of his mind and put the key away before he