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“It smacks of all Castille,” he said, handing it back with a sigh of ecstasy. “Who the devil are you, sir?”

The stranger gave a little crow.

“Peregrine Iron, sir, at your service–Captain Penegrine Iron, of the Raven sloop amongst others. You are very welcome to the run of my poor abode.”

“Yours?” I murmured in confusion. “We owe you a thousand apologies.”

“Not at all,” he said, addressing all his courtesy to William. Me, since my rejection of his beaker, he took pains to ignore.

“Not at all,” he said. “Your intrusion was quite natural under the circumstances. I take a pleasure in being your cicerone. This cabin (he waved his hand pompously)–a fancy of mine, sir, a fancy of mine. The actual material of the latest of my commands brought hither and adapted to the exigencies of shore life. It enables me to live eternally in the past–a most satisfying illusion. Come to-night and have a pipe and a glass with me.”

I thought William Tyrwhitt mad.

“I will come, by all means,” he said.

The stranger bowed us out of the room.

“That is right,” he exclaimed. “You will find me here. Good-bye for the present.”

As we plunged like dazed men into the street, now grown sunny, I turned on my friend.

“William,” I said, “did you happen to look back as we left the cabin?”

“No.”

“I did.”

“Well?”

“There was no stranger there at all. The place was empty.”

“Well?”

“You will not go to-night?”

“You bet I do.”

I shrugged my shoulders. We walked on a little way in silence. Suddenly my companion turned on me, a most truculent expression on his face.

“For an independent thinker,” he said, “you are rather a pusillanimous jackass. A man of your convictions to shy at a shadow! Fie, sir, fie! What if the room were empty? The place was full enough of traps to permit of Captain Iron’s immediate withdrawal.”

Much may be expressed in a sniff. I sniffed.

That afternoon I went back to town, and left the offensive William to his fate.

* * * * *

It found him at once.

The very day following that of my retreat, I was polishing phrases by gaslight in the dull sitting-room of my lodgings in the Lambeth Road, when he staggered in upon me. His face was like a sheep’s, white and vacant; his hands had caught a trick of groping blindly along the backs of chairs.

“You have obtained your ‘copy’?” I said.

I made him out to murmur “yes” in a shaking under-voice. He was so patently nervous that I put him in a chair and poured him out a wine-glassful of London brandy. This generally is a powerful emetic, but it had no more effect upon him than water. Then I was about to lower the gas, to save his eyes, but he stopped me with a thin shriek.

“Light, light!” he whispered. “It cannot be too light for me!”

“Now, William Tyrwhitt,” I said, by-and-by, watchful of him, and marking a faint effusion of colour soak to his cheek, “you would not accept my warning, and you were extremely rude to me. Therefore you have had an experience–“

“An awful one,” he murmured.

“An awful one, no doubt; and to obtain surcease of the haunting memory of it, you must confide its processes to me. But, first, I must put it to you, which is the more pusillanimous–to refuse to submit one’s manliness to the tyranny of the unlawful, or to rush into situations you have not the nerve to adapt yourself to?”

“I could not foresee, I could not foresee.”

“Neither could I. And that was my very reason for declining the invitation. Now proceed.”

It was long before he could. But presently he essayed, and gathered voice with the advance of his narrative, and even unconsciously threw it into something the form of “copy.” And here it is as he murmured it, but with a gasp for every full-stop.