“Which,” Wertheimer continued, standing, “is why we arranged to give him that billet with the British Legation in Peking.”

“Didn’t know you had a hand in that,” observed Duchemin, after favouring the other with a morose stare.

“Oh, you can’t trust me!  When you get to know me better you’ll find I’m always like that—­forever flitting hither and yon, bestowing benefits and boons on the ungrateful, like any other giddy Providence.”

“But one is not ungrateful,” Duchemin insisted.  “God knows I would gladly have sped Karslake’s emigration with Sonia to Van Dieman’s Land or Patagonia or where you will, if it promised to keep him out of the way long enough for the Smolny Institute to forget him.”

“Since the said Smolny inconsiderately persists in failing to collapse, as per the daily predictions of the hopeful.”

“Just so.”

“But aren’t you forgetting you yourself have given that Smolny lot the same and quite as much reason for holding your name anathema?”

“Ah!” Duchemin growled—­“as for me, I can take care of myself, thank you.  My trouble is, I want somebody else to take care of.  I had a daughter once, for a few weeks, long enough to make me strangely fond of the responsibilities of a father; and then Karslake took her away, leaving me nothing to do with my life but twiddle futile thumbs and contemplate the approach of middle age.”  “Middle age?  Why flatter yourself?  With a daughter married, too!”

“Sonia’s only eighteen...”

“She was born when you were twenty.  That makes you nearly forty, and that’s next door to second childhood, Man!” the Englishman declared solemnly—­“you’re superannuated.”

“I know; and so long as I feel my years, even you can abuse me with impunity.”

But Wertheimer would not hear him.  “Odd,” he mused, “I never thought of it before, that you were growing old.  And I’ve been wondering, too, what it was that has been making you so precious slow and cautious and cranky of late.  You’re just doddering—­and I thought you were simply tired out and needed a holiday.”

“Perhaps I am and do,” said Duchemin patiently.  “One feels one has earned a holiday, if ever anybody did in your blessed S. S.”

“Ah!  You think so?”

“You’d think so if you’d been mucking round the East End all Winter with your life in your hands.”

“Still—­at your age—­I’d be thinking about retiring instead of asking for a rest.”

Although Duchemin knew very well that he was merely being ragged in that way of deadly seriousness which so often amuses the English, he chose to suggest sourly:  “My resignation is at your disposal any time you wish it.”

“Accepted,” said Wertheimer airily, “to take effect at once.”

To this Duchemin merely grunted, as who should say he didn’t consider this turn of conversation desperately amusing.  And Wertheimer resuming his chair, the two remained for some moments in silence, a silence so doggedly maintained on both sides that Duchemin was presently aware of dull gnawings of curiosity.  It occurred to him that his caller should have found plenty to do in his bureau in the War Office....