weaknesses; he ought to conceal his horror and other emotions, and, if the fate of a human being, and that human being a magnificent young girl, is strangely involved—­why, he should contemplate that fate (whatever it might seem to be) without turning a hair.  And all these things I have done; the explaining, the listening, the pretending—­even to the discretion—­and nobody, not even Hermann’s niece, I believe, need throw stones at me now.  Schomberg at all events needn’t, since from first to last, I am happy to say, there was not the slightest “fracas.”

Overcoming a nervous contraction of the windpipe, I had managed to exclaim “Captain Falk!” His start of surprise was perfectly genuine, but afterwards he neither smiled nor scowled.  He simply waited.  Then, when I had said, “I must have a talk with you,” and had pointed to a chair at my table, he moved up to me, though he didn’t sit down.  Schomberg, however, with a long tumbler in his hand, was making towards us prudently, and I discovered then the only sign of weakness in Falk.  He had for Schomberg a repulsion resembling that sort of physical fear some people experience at the sight of a toad.  Perhaps to a man so essentially and silently concentrated upon himself (though he could talk well enough, as I was to find out presently) the other’s irrepressible loquacity, embracing every human being within range of the tongue, might have appeared unnatural, disgusting, and monstrous.  He suddenly gave signs of restiveness—­positively like a horse about to rear, and, muttering hurriedly as if in great pain, “No.  I can’t stand that fellow,” seemed ready to bolt.  This weakness of his gave me the advantage at the very start.  “Verandah,” I suggested, as if rendering him a service, and walked him out by the arm.  We stumbled over a few chairs; we had the feeling of open space before us, and felt the fresh breath of the river—­fresh, but tainted.  The Chinese theatres across the water made, in the sparsely twinkling masses of gloom an Eastern town presents at night, blazing centres of light, and of a distant and howling uproar.  I felt him become suddenly tractable again like an animal, like a good-tempered horse when the object that scares him is removed.  Yes.  I felt in the darkness there how tractable he was, without my conviction of his inflexibility—­tenacity, rather, perhaps—­being in the least weakened.  His very arm abandoning itself to my grasp was as hard as marble—­like a limb of iron.  But I heard a tumultuous scuffling of boot-soles within.  The unspeakable idiots inside were crowding to the windows, climbing over each other’s backs behind the blinds, billiard cues and all.  Somebody broke a window pane, and with the sound of falling glass, so suggestive of riot and devastation, Schomberg reeled out after us in a state of funk which had prevented his parting with his brandy and soda.  He must have trembled like an aspen leaf.  The piece of ice in the long tumbler he held in his hand tinkled with an effect of chattering teeth.  “I beg you, gentlemen,” he expostulated thickly.  “Come!  Really, now, I must insist . . .”