“There’s nawthin’ in England for me, Jackie.  My gal’s a bloomin’ foreigner by this time and she’ll sell the bleedin’ farm, of course.  She’s an h’American, God bless ’er ’eart.  I daresay if I’d go to ’er and say I’d like my farm back again she’d want to fork hover, but ’er bloody ’usband wouldn’t be for that sort of hextravagance.  ’E’d boot me off the hisland.”

“The United States isn’t an island, Tazzy,” explained Mr. Wyckholme, gulping his brandy and soda.

Mr. Wyckholme was the second son of Sir Somebody-or-other and had married the vicar’s daughter.  This put him into such bad odour with his family that he hurried off to the dogs—­and a goodly sized menagerie besides, if the records of the inebriate’s asylum are to be credited.  His wife, after enduring him for sixteen years, secured a divorce.  It may not have been intended as an insult to the scapegoat, but no sooner had she freed herself from him than his father, Sir Somebody-or-other, took her and her young daughter into the ancestral halls and gave them a much-needed abiding-place.  This left poor Mr. Jack quite completely out in the world—­and he proceeded to make the best and the worst of it while he had the strength and ambition.  Accepting the world as his home, he ventured forth to visit every nook and cranny of it.  In course of time he came upon his old-time neighbour and boyhood friend, Taswell Skaggs, in the city of Shanghai.  Neither of them had seen the British Isles in two years or more.

“’Ow do you know?” demanded Taswell.

“Haven’t I been there, old chap?  A year or more?  It’s a rotten big place where gentlemen aspire to sell gloves and handkerchiefs and needlework over the shop counters.  At any rate, that’s what every one said every one else was doing, and advised me to—­to get a situation doing the same.  You know, Tazzy, I couldn’t well afford to starve and I wouldn’t sell things, so I came away.  But it’s no island.”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there, Jackie.  I ’aven’t a ’ome and you ’aven’t a ’ome, and we’re wanderers on the face of the earth.  My wife played me a beastly trick, dying like that.  I say marriage is a blooming nuisance.”

“Marriage, my boy, is the convalescence from a love affair.  One wants to get out the worst way but has to stay in till he’s jolly well cured.  For my part, I’m never going back to England.”

“Nor I. It would be just like me, Jackie, to ’ave a relapse and never get out again.”

The old friends, with tear-dimmed eyes, shook hands and vowed that nothing short of death should part them during the remainder of their journey through life.  That night they took an inventory.  Jack Wyckholme, gentleman’s son and ne’er-do-well, possessed nine pounds and a fraction, an appetite and excellent spirits, while Taswell Skaggs exhibited a balance of one thousand pounds in a Shanghai bank, a fairly successful trade in Celestial necessities, and an unbounded eagerness to change his luck.