r Roderick, that I behaved ill to you and Mr.
Collingwood, and specially to Miss Denistoun. I had no business to
drag her into the talk. . . . But I'm only a learner in the ways
gentlemen behave. It doesn't come to me by nature, as it comes to
luckier ones, whose parents and grandparents have bred it into the
bone. You may put it that I've hair on my hoof and have to shave it
carefully. What taking trouble can do I can make it do, and don't
count the time wasted. But it's the unexpected that catches out a
man like me. . . . You see, I came up thinking to find you alone: and
I was so keen to see you, I paid no attention to the dog, queerly as
he was behaving. I thought, maybe, he'd smelt a cat. There weren't
any cats on the island, or aboard the _I'll Away_, or the cars, or
the _Oceanic_. . . . And then I burst in after the hound, as soon as
I realised that he meant mischief of some sort; and, of a sudden,
there was Foe face to face with me, and you others treating him
friendly as friendly. Was it any wonder that, coming on him like
that and after hunting him more than half the world across, I let
myself go?"

"Well, first of all," I answered coldly, "you may disabuse your mind
of any notion that Mr. Collingwood and I were chatting with Doctor
Foe in the way you suspect. As a matter of fact, after you left, we
told him what we were trying to avoid telling him in Miss Denistoun's
presence at the moment when you broke in--that, through his treatment
of you, he had forfeited our friendship."

"Had he come to hear that?" asked Farrell,--"if it's a fair
question."

"It's a perfectly fair question," said I, "and the answer is that he
had not. He had come to give me in person some information for which
I had written to him. . . . Can you guess? It was the precise
latitude and longitude of your island. . . . And now, question for
question. You hadn't tracked him here, for you have just said that
your finding him in this room took you fairly by surprise."

"Almost knocked me over," Farrell agreed.

"Then what had been your purpose in calling on me?" I asked,
"--if that, too, is a fair question."

"Well, I'll admit I was calling, in part, to get his address or
discover his whereabouts. But that wasn't my only reason. My real
reason and foremost--But before I tell it, Sir Roderick, will you
answer me yet another question? Was it true, what Mr. Collingwood
said?--that you were actually packing to search for me