But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave them for the burly and sympathetic Mills.  I was ready to drop any easy company of equals to approach that interesting man with every mental deference.  It was not precisely because of that shipwreck.  He attracted and interested me the more because he was not to be seen.  The fear that he might have departed suddenly for England—­(or for Spain)—­caused me a sort of ridiculous depression as though I had missed a unique opportunity.  And it was a joyful reaction which emboldened me to signal to him with a raised arm across that cafe.

I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards my table with his friend.  The latter was eminently elegant.  He was exactly like one of those figures one can see of a fine May evening in the neighbourhood of the Opera-house in Paris.  Very Parisian indeed.  And yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he ought to have been, as if one’s nationality were an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence.  As to Mills, he was perfectly insular.  There could be no doubt about him.  They were both smiling faintly at me.  The burly Mills attended to the introduction:  “Captain Blunt.”

We shook hands.  The name didn’t tell me much.  What surprised me was that Mills should have remembered mine so well.  I don’t want to boast of my modesty but it seemed to me that two or three days was more than enough for a man like Mills to forget my very existence.  As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his personality.  Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face, pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn’t meet every day in the south of France and still less in Italy.  Another thing was that, viewed as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently professional.  That imperfection was interesting, too.

You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it is the subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count for interest and memory—­and pretty well nothing else.  This—­you see—­is the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman.  These are like the last hours of a previous existence.  It isn’t my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal splendours of a gilded cafe and the bedlamite yells of carnival in the street.