It was this precarious moment of his fortunes which his star (his evil star, he insisted on that) selected to bring him into juxtaposition with the man whose life was to be inexorably mingled with his own from that time henceforward.  The actual meeting place was a tin-roofed grog shanty kept by a giant Kaffir woman and a sore-eyed degenerate white man, whose subjection to his black paramour had earned for him among the blacks on the field the terrible sobriquet of “White Harry.”  Here, one night, Thalassa sat drinking bad beer and planning impossible schemes for returning to his diamonds at the other end of the world.  The place was empty of other customers.  The Kaffir woman slumbered behind the flimsy planking of the bar, and “White Harry” sat on the counter scraping tunes out of a little fiddle.  Thalassa remembered the tune he was playing—­“Annie Laurie.”  Upon this scene there entered two young men, Englishmen.  Thalassa discerned that at once by the cut of their jib.  Besides, they ordered Bass beer.  Who else but Englishmen would order Bass beer at five shillings a bottle in a God-forsaken place like that?

“He was one of them.”  Thalassa moved his hand vaguely in the direction of St. Fair churchyard.  “Smart and lively he was then—­not like what he was afore he died.  I took a fancy to him as soon as I set my eyes on him.  He was a man in those days, and I knowed a man when I saw ’un.  I didn’t care so much for the looks of the other ’un—­Remington was his name, as I heered afterwards.  Well enough for some tastes, but too much of the God Almighty Englishman about him to suit me.  A handsome chap he was, this Remington, I’m bound to say—­young and slim, wi’ a pink face like a girl’s, not a hair on it, and lookin’ as though he might a’ turned out of a bandbox.  Him—­Turold—­had a moustache, and his face was a dark ’un, but I liked him for all his black looks—­though not so black in those days, either.  More eager like.”

Charles Turold found himself trying to picture Robert Turold in the part of a smart lively young fellow, and failing utterly.  But Time took the smartness out of a man in less than thirty years.  It had also taken the liveliness out of Robert Turold for good and all.

Thalassa went on with his story.  The young men were served with their beer at five shillings a bottle, and sat down in a corner to drink it.  They talked as they sipped, and Thalassa listened.  His original idea that they were young men of wealth (because of the Bass) was soon dispersed by the trend of their conversation.  They had gone out from England to make their fortunes on the fields, but had come a cropper like himself, and were discussing what they’d do next.  The fair-haired one, Remington, was all for getting back to England while they had any money left, but Turold was dead against it.  There were plenty of diamonds to be found, and he was going to have some of them.  He’d been talking to a man who was just back from the interior with a story