“Yes—­an unfortunate situation, James.  May I have another cigar?  Thanks.”

“Sorry I have no whisky, Grey.”

“And I—­How it pours!  What a downfall!”

The Colonel was becoming more and more outwardly polite.

“Good-bye, Henry.”

“Au revoir,” said the younger man.

Penhallow went with his brother-in-law down the long corridor, neither man speaking again.  As they passed Josiah, Penhallow said, “I shall want my horse at five, and shall want you with me.”  At the head of the stairs he dismissed his visitor without a further word.  Then he turned back quickly to Josiah and said in a low voice, “Follow that man—­don’t lose him.  Take your time.  It is important—­a matter of life and death to me—­to know where he lives.  Quick now—­I trust you.”

“Yes, sir.”  He was gone.

Grey feeling entirely safe walked away in the heavy rain with a mind at ease and a little sorry as a soldier for the hapless situation with which Penhallow had had to struggle.  When we have known men only in the every-day business of life or in ordinary social relations, we may quite fail to credit them with qualities which are never called into activity except by unusual circumstances.  Grey, an able engineer, regarded Penhallow as a rather slow thinker, a good man of business, and now as a commonplace, well-mannered officer.  He smiled as he thought how his sister had made her husband in this present predicament what algebraists call a “negligible quantity.”  He would have been less easy had he known that the man he left felt keenly a sense of imperilled honour and of insult which his relation to Grey forbade him to avenge.  He had become a man alert, observant, and quick to see his way and to act.

Josiah, with all his hunting instincts aroused, loitered idly after Grey in the rain, one of the scores of lazy, unnoticeable negroes.  He was gone all the afternoon, and at eight o’clock found Penhallow in his room.  “Did you find where he lives?” asked the Colonel.

“That man, he lives at 229 Sixteenth Street.  Two more live there.  They was in and out all day—­and he went to shops and carried things away—­”

“What kind of shops?”

“Where they sell paper and pens—­and ’pothecaries.”

“Sit down—­you look tired.”  It was plain that they were soon about to move and were buying what was needed in the South—­quinine, of course.  But what had been their errand?  He said, “Get some supper and come back soon.”

Then he sat down to think.  An engineer of competence lately back from Europe!  His errand—­their errand—­must be of moment.  He took a small revolver out of a drawer, put in shells, placed it in his breast pocket, and secured a box of matches.  About nine, in a summer thunder-shower of wind and rain, he followed Josiah and walked to No. 229 Sixteenth Street.  As he stood he asked,

“How did those men get in, Josiah?”