“Yes.  I do think so.  It is demoralising.  You don’t see any one for months at a stretch.  You’re leading an unhealthy life.”

The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.

“You see,” insisted the other.  “Solitude works like a sort of poison.  And then you perceive suggestions in faces—­mysterious and forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with.  Of course you do.”

Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the others.  He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which every day adds to a human countenance.  They moved and disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and exploration.

“It’s a fact,” he said, “that when I am at home in Malata I see no one consciously.  I take the plantation boys for granted.”

“Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted.  And that’s sanity.”

The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion.  What he had come to seek in the editorial office was not controversy, but information.  Yet somehow he hesitated to approach the subject.  Solitary life makes a man reticent in respect of anything in the nature of gossip, which those to whom chatting about their kind is an everyday exercise regard as the commonest use of speech.

“You very busy?” he asked.

The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the pencil down.

“No.  I am done.  Social paragraphs.  This office is the place where everything is known about everybody—­including even a great deal of nobodies.  Queer fellows drift in and out of this room.  Waifs and strays from home, from up-country, from the Pacific.  And, by the way, last time you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant—­didn’t you?”

“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the half-resentful tone.  His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person shook all over.  He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom—­or his sagacity.  But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of exploration:  the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work, of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial government.  And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s advocacy with word and pen—­for he was an influential man in the community.  Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy