’I made a trip to the northward, and when I returned I found another letter from my friend waiting for me.  It was the first envelope I tore open.  “There are no spoons missing, as far as I know,” ran the first line; “I haven’t been interested enough to inquire.  He is gone, leaving on the breakfast-table a formal little note of apology, which is either silly or heartless.  Probably both—­and it’s all one to me.  Allow me to say, lest you should have some more mysterious young men in reserve, that I have shut up shop, definitely and for ever.  This is the last eccentricity I shall be guilty of.  Do not imagine for a moment that I care a hang; but he is very much regretted at tennis-parties, and for my own sake I’ve told a plausible lie at the club. . . .”  I flung the letter aside and started looking through the batch on my table, till I came upon Jim’s handwriting.  Would you believe it?  One chance in a hundred!  But it is always that hundredth chance!  That little second engineer of the Patna had turned up in a more or less destitute state, and got a temporary job of looking after the machinery of the mill.  “I couldn’t stand the familiarity of the little beast,” Jim wrote from a seaport seven hundred miles south of the place where he should have been in clover.  “I am now for the time with Egstrom & Blake, ship-chandlers, as their—­well—­runner, to call the thing by its right name.  For reference I gave them your name, which they know of course, and if you could write a word in my favour it would be a permanent employment.”  I was utterly crushed under the ruins of my castle, but of course I wrote as desired.  Before the end of the year my new charter took me that way, and I had an opportunity of seeing him.

’He was still with Egstrom & Blake, and we met in what they called “our parlour” opening out of the store.  He had that moment come in from boarding a ship, and confronted me head down, ready for a tussle.  “What have you got to say for yourself?” I began as soon as we had shaken hands.  “What I wrote you—­nothing more,” he said stubbornly.  “Did the fellow blab—­or what?” I asked.  He looked up at me with a troubled smile.  “Oh, no!  He didn’t.  He made it a kind of confidential business between us.  He was most damnably mysterious whenever I came over to the mill; he would wink at me in a respectful manner—­as much as to say ’We know what we know.’  Infernally fawning and familiar—­and that sort of thing . . .”  He threw himself into a chair and stared down his legs.  “One day we happened to be alone and the fellow had the cheek to say, ’Well, Mr. James’—­I was called Mr. James there as if I had been the son—­’here we are together once more.  This is better than the old ship—­ain’t it?’ . . .  Wasn’t it appalling, eh?  I looked at him, and he put on a knowing air.  ‘Don’t you be uneasy, sir,’ he says.  ’I know a gentleman when I see one, and I know how a gentleman feels.  I hope, though, you will be keeping me on this job.  I had a hard time of it too, along of that rotten old Patna racket.’  Jove!  It was awful.  I don’t know what I should have said or done if I had not just then heard Mr. Denver calling me in the passage.  It was tiffin-time, and we walked together across the yard and through the garden to the bungalow.  He began to chaff me in his kindly way . . .  I believe he liked me . . .”