’I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred to me that Jim might have come on a visit.  I own I was pleased and excited at the thought.  Tamb’ Itam looked as if he did not know what to say.  “Is Tuan Jim inside?” I asked impatiently.  “No,” he mumbled, hanging his head for a moment, and then with sudden earnestness, “He would not fight.  He would not fight,” he repeated twice.  As he seemed unable to say anything else, I pushed him aside and went in.

’Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of the room between the rows of butterfly cases.  “Ach! is it you, my friend?” he said sadly, peering through his glasses.  A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung, unbuttoned, down to his knees.  He had a Panama hat on his head, and there were deep furrows on his pale cheeks.  “What’s the matter now?” I asked nervously.  “There’s Tamb’ Itam there. . . .”  “Come and see the girl.  Come and see the girl.  She is here,” he said, with a half-hearted show of activity.  I tried to detain him, but with gentle obstinacy he would take no notice of my eager questions.  “She is here, she is here,” he repeated, in great perturbation.  “They came here two days ago.  An old man like me, a stranger—­sehen Sie—­cannot do much. . . .  Come this way. . . .  Young hearts are unforgiving. . . .”  I could see he was in utmost distress. . . .  “The strength of life in them, the cruel strength of life. . . .”  He mumbled, leading me round the house; I followed him, lost in dismal and angry conjectures.  At the door of the drawing-room he barred my way.  “He loved her very much,” he said interrogatively, and I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would not trust myself to speak.  “Very frightful,” he murmured.  “She can’t understand me.  I am only a strange old man.  Perhaps you . . . she knows you.  Talk to her.  We can’t leave it like this.  Tell her to forgive him.  It was very frightful.”  “No doubt,” I said, exasperated at being in the dark; “but have you forgiven him?” He looked at me queerly.  “You shall hear,” he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.

’You know Stein’s big house and the two immense reception-rooms, uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man?  They are cool on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave underground.  I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her head, the face hidden in her arms.  The waxed floor reflected her dimly as though it had been a sheet of frozen water.  The rattan screens were down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies of windows and doorways.  Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like glittering icicles.  She looked up and watched my approach.  I was chilled as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.