Heaven knows how long the affair might have lasted but for the fact that a husband, or somebody, unexpectedly turned up—­a husky little man with a cast in one eye, who looked uxorious to an alarming degree.  He carried her off in the nick of time to save Mr. Eames from social ostracism, mental dotage, and financial ruin.  Her mere appearance had made him the laughing-stock of the place; her appetite had led him into outlays altogether incompatible with his income, chiefly in the matter of pastries, macaroons, fondants, ices, caramels, chocolates, jam tartlets and, above all, meringues, to which she was fabulously destructive.

It took some living down, that episode.  He feared people would talk of it to his dying day; he knew they would!  He wished balloons had never been invented.  None the less he stuck it out bravely, threw himself with redoubled zeal into Monsignor Perrelli and, incidentally, became more of a recluse than ever.

“It has been a lesson,” he reflected.  “Semper ALIQUID HAEREBIT, I am afraid. . . .”

Ernest Eames was the ideal annotator.  He was neither inductive nor deductive; he had no axe to grind.  His talent consisted in an ant—­like hiving faculty.  He was acquisitive of information for a set purpose—­to bring the antiquities up to date.  Whatever failed to fit in with this programme, however novel, however interesting—­it was ruthlessly discarded.  In this and other matters he was the reverse of Keith, who collected information for its own sake.  Keith was a pertinacious and omnivorous student; he sought knowledge not for a set purpose but because nothing was without interest for him.  He took all learning to his province.  He read for the pleasure of knowing what he did not know before; his mind was unusually receptive because, he said, he respected the laws which governed his body.  Facts were his prey.  He threw himself into them with a kind of piratical ardour; took them by the throat, wallowed in them, worried them like a terrier, and finally assimilated them.  They gave him food for what he liked best on earth:  “disinterested thought.”  They “formed a rich loam.”  He had an encyclopaeic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.  He could tell you how many public baths exited in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of Mehemet Ali’s whiskers, why the manuscript of Virgil’s friend Gallius had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year, and what month, the decimal system was introduced into Finland.  Such aimless incursions into knowledge were a puzzle to his friends, but not to himself.  They helped him to build up a harmonious scheme of life—­to round himself off.