“At some lodgings over yonder, where they fleece me,” replied the Major.  “You should see the bill they’ve brought me in for last week.  They’ve made me eat four pounds of butter and five joints of meat, besides poultry and pickles and a fruit pie!  Why, I live mostly upon dry toast; hardly dare touch an ounce of meat in a day.  When I had ’em up before me, the harpies, they laid it upon my servant’s appetite—­old Saul, you know. He answered them.”

Mrs. Hamlyn laughed.  “There are two articles that are very convenient, as I have heard, to some of the lodging-house keepers:  their lodgers’ servant, and their own cat.”

“By Jove, ma’am, yes!” said the Major.  “But I’ve given warning to this lot where I am.”

Saying au revoir to Major Pratt, Mr. Hamlyn walked down the pier again with his wife.  “Who is he, Philip?” she asked.  “You seem to know him well.”

“Very well.  He is a sort of connection of mine, I believe,” laughed Mr. Hamlyn, “and I saw a good deal of him in India a few years back.  He is greatly changed.  I hardly think I should have known him had he not spoken.  It’s his liver, I suppose.”

Leaving his wife at the hotel, Mr. Hamlyn went back again to Major Pratt, much to the lonely Major’s satisfaction, who was still leaning on his substantial stick as he gazed at the water.

“The sight of you has brought back to my mind all that unhappy business, Hamlyn,” was his salutation.  “I shall have a fit of the jaundice now, I suppose!  Here—­let’s sit down a bit.”

“And the sight of you has brought it to mine,” said Mr. Hamlyn, as he complied.  “I have been striving to drive it out of my remembrance.”

“I know little about it,” observed the Major.  “She never wrote to me at all afterwards, and you wrote me but two letters:  the one announcing the fact of her disgrace; the other, the calamity and the deaths.”

“That is quite enough to know; don’t ask me to go over the details to you personally,” said Mr. Hamlyn in a tone of passionate discomfort.  “So utterly repugnant to me is the remembrance altogether, that I have never spoken of it—­even to my present wife.”

“Do you mean you’ve not told her you were once a married man?” cried Major Pratt.

“No, I have not.”

“Then you’ve shown a lack of judgment which I wouldn’t have given you credit for, my friend,” declared the Major.  “A man may whisper to his girl any untoward news he pleases of his past life, and she’ll forgive and forget; aye, and worship him all the more for it, though it were the having set fire to a church:  but if he keeps it as a bonne bouchee to drop out after marriage, when she has him fast and tight, she’ll curry-comb his hair for him in style.  Believe that.”

Mr. Hamlyn laughed.

“There never was a hidden skeleton between man and wife yet but it came to light sooner or later,” went on the Major.  “If you are wise, you will tell her at once, before somebody else does.”