said encouragingly, but had to change
my tone at once. "You had better go down that way a little," I directed
her abruptly.

* * * * *

I had seen Fyne come striding out of the hotel door. The intelligent
girl, without staying to ask questions, walked away from me quietly down
one street while I hurried on to meet Fyne coming up the other at his
efficient pedestrian gait. My object was to stop him getting as far as
the corner. He must have been thinking too hard to be aware of his
surroundings. I put myself in his way, and he nearly walked into me.

"Hallo!" I said.

His surprise was extreme. "You here! You don't mean to say you have
been waiting for me?"

I said negligently that I had been detained by unexpected business in the
neighbourhood, and thus happened to catch sight of him coming out.

He stared at me with solemn distraction, obviously thinking of something
else. I suggested that he had better take the next city-ward tramcar. He
was inattentive, and I perceived that he was profoundly perturbed. As
Miss de Barral (she had moved out of sight) could not possibly approach
the hotel door as long as we remained where we were I proposed that we
should wait for the car on the other side of the street. He obeyed
rather the slight touch on his arm than my words, and while we were
crossing the wide roadway in the midst of the lumbering wheeled traffic,
he exclaimed in his deep tone, "I don't know which of these two is more
mad than the other!"

"Really!" I said, pulling him forward from under the noses of two
enormous sleepy-headed cart-horses. He skipped wildly out of the way and
up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind had
nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while
in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to relieve
his outraged feelings.

"You would never believe! They _are_ mad!"

I took care to place myself in such a position that to face me he had to
turn his back on the hotel across the road. I believe he was glad I was
there to talk to. But I thought there was some misapprehension in the
first statement he shot out at me without loss of time, that Captain
Anthony had been glad to see him. It was indeed difficult to believe
that, directly he opened the door, his wife's "sailor-brother" had
positively shouted: "Oh, it's you! The very man I wanted to see."

"I found him sitting there," went on Fyne impressively in h