My chief then suddenly intervened, and, trembling violently, said that it could not go on—­that it was a mistake.  He took the blame on his shoulders, he said, and would apologise himself later on.  For many minutes he harangued, and in the end the officer went away with his eyes glittering, but not too reluctantly.  He knew that I could have killed him with my second chamber unless his first shot hit my vitals....

After that there was a second scene—­but one which was much more brief.  My chief attempted to deal with me, and to him I spoke my mind.  I am afraid I said many things which were so brusque that modern society would have reproved me.  I told him that it was well known that he and every other man of position had been tremulously fearing death at every turn for weeks, and had been unwilling to do anything when they might have really saved the situation; merely because they were so afraid; that everything had been misstated in the reports, and that although the full truth might not be known for years, eventually it would be known and people would understand.  I said that this petty life created by men without stomachs had ended by disgusting me, and that I had finished with it for good and for ever.  Then I went out in silence, slamming the door behind me with all the strength of my arms.  It was a most enormous slam.  It had to be so; it was my last word.  In my commandeered residence I found that the breath of misfortune had also come.  The rightful owners had managed to steal into Peking in the train of some big official who had had an escort of foreign soldiery provided him, and now smilingly and cringingly greeted me, and thanked me for my guardianship during their unavoidable absence.  The Manchu women were grouped round in great excitement.  They did not relish the change—­they did not want it.  The tall and stately one who had first touched my knee on that dark night during the sack was not there.

The rightful owners irritated me intensely with their obsequiousness.  I was irritated because they lived:  they should have ceased to exist long ago.  They were still very much afraid, although they had reached Peking in safety, for they half thought that I would hand them over to some provost-marshal as Boxer partisans in order to get rid of them.  They were very afraid.  The Manchu women were all talking and praising me, and telling wonderful stories of all I had done.  But the most important one of them was absent.  I became vaguely conscious that this also meant something, that perhaps there was to be another tragedy.  I found her later wishing to kill herself, to commit suicide, so that she, too, need never return to her other life....  That was more terrible than the other scenes.  I could do nothing, yet my responsibility had been great.  In the end something was arranged.  I hardly remember what.