“Are we ready?” he asked; and turning, took a slow, cool survey of the nunnery, as though looking his last—­from the ditch at their feet to the red tiles, patched with bronze mould, that capped the walls and the roof.  “I never left any place with less regret.  Come, let’s go.”

The three men had covered some ground before Rudolph broke the silence.

“You’ll find a few little things up there in my strong-box, Maurice.  Some are marked for you, and the rest—­will you send them Home, please?” He hesitated.  “I hope neither of you will misunderstand me.  I’m horribly afraid, but not—­but only because this fellow will make me look absurd.  If I knew the first motion!” He broke out angrily.  “I cannot bear to have him laugh, also!  I cannot bear!”

Heywood clapped him on the shoulder, and gave a queer cough.

“If that’s all, never you fear!  I’ll teach you your guard.  ’Once in a while we can finish in style.’  Eh?—­Rudie, you blooming German, I—­I think we must have been brothers!  We’ll pull it off yet.”

Heywood spoke with a strange alacrity, and tried again to cough.  This time, however, there was no mistake—­he was laughing.

Rudolph shot at him one glance of startled unbelief, and then, tossing his head, marched on without a word.  Pride and loneliness overwhelmed him.  The two at his side were no companions—­not even presences.  He went alone, conscious only of the long flood of sunset, and the black interlacing pattern of bamboos.  The one friendly spirit had deserted, laughing; yet even this last and worst of earthly puzzles did not matter.  It was true, what he had read; this, which they called death, was a lonely thing.

On a broken stone bench, Sturgeon, sober and dejected, with puffy circles under his eyes, sat waiting.  A long parcel, wrapped in green baize, lay across his knees.  He nodded gloomily, without rising.  At his feet wandered a path, rankly matted with burnt weeds, and bordered with green bottle-ends, the “dimples” choked with discs of mud.  The place was a deserted garden, where the ruins of a European house—­burnt by natives in some obscure madness, years ago—­sprawled in desolation among wild shrubs.  A little way down the path stood Teppich and Chantel, each with his back turned and his hands clasped, like a pair of sulky Napoleons, one fat, one slender.  The wooden pretense of their attitude set Rudolph, for an instant, to laughing silently and bitterly.  This final scene,—­what justice, that it should be a mean waste, the wreck of silly pleasure-grounds, long forgotten, and now used only by grotesque play-actors.  He must die, in both action and setting, without dignity.  It was some comfort, he became aware, to find that the place was fairly private.  Except for the breach by which they had entered, the blotched and spotted compound walls stood ruinous yet high, shutting out all but a rising slant of sunlight, and from some outpost line of shops, near by, the rattle of an abacus and the broken singsong of argument, now harsh, now drowsy.