And he had retired to the most remote place he could find in the British islands.  There was no other house on that corner of the coast.  The man was as alone as he would have been in the Gobi.

If he had planned to be alone one would have believed he had succeeded in that intention.  And yet from the moment I got down from the gillie’s cart I seemed drawn under a persisting surveillance.  I felt now that some one was looking at me.  I turned quickly.  There was a door at the end of the room opening onto a bit of garden facing the sea.  A man stood, now, just inside this door, his hand on the latch.  His head and shoulders were stooped as though he had been there some moments, as though he had let himself noiselessly in, and remained there watching me before the fire.

But if so, he was prepared against my turning.  He snapped the latch and came down the room to where I stood.

He was a big stoop-shouldered Englishman with a pale, pasty face beginning to sag at the jowls.  There was a queer immobility about the features as though the man were always in some fear.  His eyes were a pale tallow color and seemed too small for their immense sockets.  One could see that the man had been a gentleman.  I write it in the past, because at the moment I felt it as in the past.  I felt that something had dispossessed him.

“This will be Robin,” he said.  “My dear fellow, it was fine of you to travel all this way to see me.”

He had a nervous cold hand with hardly any pressure in the grasp of it.  His thin black hair was brushed across the top of his bald head, and the distended, apprehensive expression on his face did not change.

He made me sit down by the fire and asked me about the family in America.  But there was, I thought, no real interest in this interrogation until he came to a reflective comment.

“I should like to go to America,” he said; “there must be great wastes of country where one would be out of the world.”

The sincerity of this expression stood out in the trivial talk.  It indicated something that disturbed the man.  He was as isolated as he could get in England, but that was not enough.

He sat for a moment silent, the fingers of his nervous hand moving on his knee.  When he glanced up, with a sudden jerk of his head, he caught me looking at the little image of Buddha in its glass box on the mantelpiece.

Was this longing for solitude the influence of this mysterious religion?

Remote, lonely isolation was a cult of Buddha.  The devotees of that cult sought the waste places of the earth for their meditations.  To be out of the world, in its physical contact, was a prime postulate in the practice of this creed.

“Ah, Robin,” he cried, as though he were in a jovial mood and careless of the subject, “do you have a hobby?”

I answered that I had not felt the need of one.  The inquiry was a surprise and I could think of nothing better to reply with.