Saying this I rose, for we had finished our dessert, and proposed coffee in the lounge.  There we found Colonel Bunnion at so wilful a loose end that I could not find it in my heart to refuse him an introduction to Lola.  He manifested his delight by lifting the skirt of his dinner-jacket with his hands and rising on his spurs like a bantam cock.  I left her to him for a moment and went over to say a civil word to the Misses Bostock of South Shields.  I regret to say I noticed a certain frigidity in their demeanour.  The well-conducted man in South Shields does not go out one night with a revolver tucked away in the pocket of his dress-suit, and turn up the next evening with a striking-looking lady with bronze hair.  Such goings-on are seen on the stage in South Shields in melodrama, and they are the goings-on of the villain.  In the eyes of the gentle ladies my reputation was gone.  I was trying to rehabilitate myself when the chasseur brought me a telegram.  I asked permission to open it, and stepped aside.

The words of the telegram were like a ringing box on the ears.

“Tell me immediately why Lola has joined you in Algiers. —­KYNNERSLEY.”

Not “Dale,” mark you, as he has signed himself ever since I knew him in Eton collars, but “Kynnersley.”  Why has Lola joined you?  Why have you run off with Lola?  What’s the reason of this treacherous abduction?  Account for yourself immediately.  Stand and deliver.  I stood there gaping at the words like an idiot, my blood tingling at the implied accusation.  The peremptoriness of it!  The impudence of the boy!  The wild extravagance of the idea!  And yet, while my head was reeling with one buffet a memory arose and gave me another on the other side.  I remembered the preposterous attitude in which Dale had found us when he rushed from Berlin into Lola’s drawing-room.

I took the confounded telegram into a remote corner of the lounge, like a dog with a bone, and growled over it for a time until the humour of the situation turned the growl into a chuckle.  Even had I been in sound health and strength, the idea of running off with Lola would have been absurd.  But for me, in my present eumoirous disposition of mind; for me, a half-disembodied spirit who had cast all vain and disturbing human emotions into the mud of Murglebed-on-Sea; for me who had a spirit’s calm disregard for the petty passions and interests of mankind and walked through the world with no other object than healing a few human woes; for me who already saw death on the other side of the river and found serious occupation in exchanging airy badinage with him; for me with an abominable little pain inside inexorably eating my life out and wasting me away literally and perceptibly like a shadow and twisting me up half a dozen times a day in excruciating agony; for me, in this delectable condition of soul and this deplorable condition of body, to think of running hundreds of miles from home with—­to say the least of it—­so inconvenient a creature as a big, bronze-haired woman, the idea was inexpressibly and weirdly comic.