“Not at all the style of man.  You understand,” he insisted, superfluously, looking hard at me.

I smiled urbanely.  He seemed at a loss for a while.

“I suppose I must report a suicide.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Suicide!  That’s what I’ll have to write to my owners directly I get in.”

“Unless you manage to recover him before to-morrow,” I assented, dispassionately. . .  “I mean, alive.”

He mumbled something which I really did not catch, and I turned my ear to him in a puzzled manner.  He fairly bawled: 

“The land—­I say, the mainland is at least seven miles off my anchorage.”

“About that.”

My lack of excitement, of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of pronounced interest, began to arouse his distrust.  But except for the felicitous pretence of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything.  I had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and therefore was afraid to try.  It is also certain that he had brought some ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a strange and unnatural phenomenon.  And yet how else could I have received him?  Not heartily!  That was impossible for psychological reasons, which I need not state here.  My only object was to keep off his inquiries.  Surlily?  Yes, but surliness might have provoked a point-blank question.  From its novelty to him and from its nature, punctilious courtesy was the manner best calculated to restrain the man.  But there was the danger of his breaking through my defence bluntly.  I could not, I think, have met him by a direct lie, also for psychological (not moral) reasons.  If he had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of identity with the other to the test!  But, strangely enough—­(I thought of it only afterward)—­I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded him of the man he was seeking—­suggested a mysterious similitude to the young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the first.

However that might have been, the silence was not very prolonged.  He took another oblique step.

“I reckon I had no more than a two-mile pull to your ship.  Not a bit more.”

“And quite enough, too, in this awful heat,” I said.

Another pause full of mistrust followed.  Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.  And I was afraid he would ask me point-blank for news of my other self.

“Nice little saloon, isn’t it?” I remarked, as if noticing for the first time the way his eyes roamed from one closed door to the other.  “And very well fitted out too.  Here, for instance,” I continued, reaching over the back of my seat negligently and flinging the door open, “is my bath-room.”

He made an eager movement, but hardly gave it a glance.  I got up, shut the door of the bath-room, and invited him to have a look round, as if I were very proud of my accommodation.  He had to rise and be shown round, but he went through the business without any raptures whatever.