When I first met Camilla Payne she was shorthand clerk or private secretary, or whatever you call it, to Louis Ravengar.  I saw her in his office.  Curiously, she didn’t make a tremendous impression on me at the moment.  By the way, Polycarp, if it is indeed you who listen to this, you must excuse my way of relating the facts.  I can only tell the tale in my own way.  Besides meddling with finance, I’ve dabbled in pretty nearly all the arts, including the art of fiction, and I can’t leave out the really interesting pieces of my narrative merely because you’re a lawyer and hate needless details, sentimental or otherwise.  But do you hate sentimental details?  I don’t know.  Anyhow, this isn’t a counsel’s brief.  What was I saying?  Oh!  She didn’t make a tremendous impression on me at the moment, but I thought of her afterwards.  I thought of her a good deal in a quiet way after I had left her—­so much so that I made a special journey to Ravengar’s a few days afterwards, when there was no real need for me to go, in order to have a look at her face again.  I should explain that I was dabbling in finance just then, fairly successfully, and had transactions with Ravengar.  He didn’t know that I was the son of the man who had taken his stepmother away from his father, and I never told him I had changed my name, because the scandals attached to it by Ravengar and his father had made things very unpleasant for any bearer of that name.  Still, Ravengar happened to be the man I wanted to deal with, and so I didn’t let any stupid resentment on my part stop me from dealing with him.  He was a scoundrel, but he played the game, I may incidentally mention.  I venture to give this frank opinion about one of your most important clients, because he’ll be dead before you read this, Polycarp.  At least, I expect so.

Well, the day I called specially with a view to seeing her she was not there.  She had left Ravengar’s employment, and disappeared.  Ravengar seemed to be rather perturbed about it.  But perhaps he was perturbed about the suicide which had recently taken place in his office.  I felt it—­I mean I felt her disappearance.  However, the memory of her face gave me something very charming to fall back on in moments of depression, and it was at this time something occurred sufficient to make me profoundly depressed for the remainder of my life.  I was over in Paris, and seeing a good deal of Darcy, my friend the English doctor there.  We were having a long yarn one night in his rooms over the Cafe Americain, and he said to me suddenly:  ’Look here, old chap, I’m going to do something very unprofessional, because I fancy you’ll thank me for it.’  He said it just like that, bursting out all of a sudden.  So I said, ‘Well?’ He said:  ’It’s very serious, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand I should be a blundering idiot to tell you.’  I said to him:  ’You’ve begun.  Finish.  And let’s see whether I’ll thank you.’  He then told me