his home, had gone restlessly abroad.  The restlessness had grown, a certain taste for Oriental literature and thought had been fostered by his travels.  He had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth—­a man of many clubs in different quarters of the world, and of many friends, who had come to look upon his unexpected appearance and no less sudden departure as part of the ordinary tenour of their lives.  Thus it was not the appearance of Hatch which had startled Ralston, but rather the silence of it.

“Why didn’t you speak?” he asked.  “Why did you stand waiting there for me to look your way?”

Hatch laughed as he sat down in a chair.

“I have got into the habit of waiting, I suppose,” he said.  “For the last five months I have been a servant in the train of the Sultan of the Maldive Islands.”

Ralston was not as a rule to be surprised by any strange thing which Hatch might have chosen to do.  He merely glanced at his companion and asked: 

“What in the world were you doing in the Maldive Islands?”

“Nothing at all,” replied Hatch.  “I did not go to them.  I joined the Sultan at Suez.”

This time Ralston, who had been moving about the room in search of some papers which he had mislaid, came to a stop.  His attention was arrested.  He sat down in a chair and prepared to listen.

“Go on,” he said.

“I wanted to go to Mecca,” said Hatch, and Ralston nodded his head as though he had expected just those words.

“I did not see how I was going to get there by myself,” Hatch continued, “however carefully I managed my disguise.”

“Yet you speak Arabic,” said Ralston.

“Yes, the language wasn’t the difficulty.  Indeed, a great many of the pilgrims—­the people from Central Asia, for instance—­don’t speak Arabic at all.  But I felt sure that if I went down the Red Sea alone on a pilgrim steamer, landed alone at Jeddah, and went up with a crowd of others to Mecca, living with them, sleeping with them, day after day, sooner or later I should make some fatal slip and never reach Mecca at all.  If Burton made one mistake, how many should I?  So I put the journey off year after year.  But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage.  He was a friend of mine.  I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me.”

“So you went to Mecca,” exclaimed Ralston.

“Yes; I have just come from Mecca.  As I told you, I only landed at Calcutta last night.”

Ralston was silent for a few moments.

“I think you may be able to help me,” he said at length.  “There’s a man here in Calcutta,” and Ralston related what he knew of the history of Shere Ali, dwelling less upon the unhappiness and isolation of the Prince than upon the political consequences of his isolation.