I did not nod to him.  He was too big to be nodded to in that parlour.  He was a senior Trinity pilot and condescended to take his turn in the cutter only during the summer months.  He had been many times in charge of royal yachts in and out of Port Victoria.  Besides, it’s no use nodding to a monument.  And he was like one.  He didn’t speak, he didn’t budge.  He just sat there, holding his handsome old head up, immovable, and almost bigger than life.  It was extremely fine.  Mr. Stonor’s presence reduced poor old Jermyn to a mere shabby wisp of a man, and made the talkative stranger in tweeds on the hearthrug look absurdly boyish.  The latter must have been a few years over thirty, and was certainly not the sort of individual that gets abashed at the sound of his own voice, because gathering me in, as it were, by a friendly glance, he kept it going without a check.

“I was glad of it,” he repeated, emphatically.  “You may be surprised at it, but then you haven’t gone through the experience I’ve had of her.  I can tell you, it was something to remember.  Of course, I got off scot free myself—­as you can see.  She did her best to break up my pluck for me tho’.  She jolly near drove as fine a fellow as ever lived into a madhouse.  What do you say to that—­eh?”

Not an eyelid twitched in Mr. Stonor’s enormous face.  Monumental!  The speaker looked straight into my eyes.

“It used to make me sick to think of her going about the world murdering people.”

Jermyn approached the handkerchief a little nearer to the grate and groaned.  It was simply a habit he had.

“I’ve seen her once,” he declared, with mournful indifference.  “She had a house—­”

The stranger in tweeds turned to stare down at him, surprised.

“She had three houses,” he corrected, authoritatively.  But Jermyn was not to be contradicted.

“She had a house, I say,” he repeated, with dismal obstinacy.  “A great, big, ugly, white thing.  You could see it from miles away—­sticking up.”

“So you could,” assented the other readily.  “It was old Colchester’s notion, though he was always threatening to give her up.  He couldn’t stand her racket any more, he declared; it was too much of a good thing for him; he would wash his hands of her, if he never got hold of another—­and so on.  I daresay he would have chucked her, only—­it may surprise you—­his missus wouldn’t hear of it.  Funny, eh?  But with women, you never know how they will take a thing, and Mrs. Colchester, with her moustaches and big eyebrows, set up for being as strong-minded as they make them.  She used to walk about in a brown silk dress, with a great gold cable flopping about her bosom.  You should have heard her snapping out:  ‘Rubbish!’ or ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ I daresay she knew when she was well off.  They had no children, and had never set up a home anywhere.  When in England she just made shift to hang out anyhow in some cheap hotel or boarding-house.  I daresay she