of a love affair, I believe.  He fondly hoped he had done with the sea for ever, and made sure he had got hold of all the bliss on earth, but it came to canvassing in the end.  Some cousin of his in Liverpool put up to it.  He used to tell us his experiences in that line.  He made us laugh till we cried, and, not altogether displeased at the effect, undersized and bearded to the waist like a gnome, he would tiptoe amongst us and say, “It’s all very well for you beggars to laugh, but my immortal soul was shrivelled down to the size of a parched pea after a week of that work.”  I don’t know how Jim’s soul accommodated itself to the new conditions of his life—­I was kept too busy in getting him something to do that would keep body and soul together—­but I am pretty certain his adventurous fancy was suffering all the pangs of starvation.  It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling.  It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit.  I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—­an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry.  He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger’s donkey.  He did it very well.  He shut himself in, put his head down, said never a word.  Very well; very well indeed—­except for certain fantastic and violent outbreaks, on the deplorable occasions when the irrepressible Patna case cropped up.  Unfortunately that scandal of the Eastern seas would not die out.  And this is the reason why I could never feel I had done with Jim for good.

’I sat thinking of him after the French lieutenant had left, not, however, in connection with De Jongh’s cool and gloomy backshop, where we had hurriedly shaken hands not very long ago, but as I had seen him years before in the last flickers of the candle, alone with me in the long gallery of the Malabar House, with the chill and the darkness of the night at his back.  The respectable sword of his country’s law was suspended over his head.  To-morrow—­or was it to-day? (midnight had slipped by long before we parted)—­the marble-faced police magistrate, after distributing fines and terms of imprisonment in the assault-and-battery case, would take up the awful weapon and smite his bowed neck.  Our communion in the night was uncommonly like a last vigil with a condemned man.  He was guilty too.  He was guilty—­as I had told myself repeatedly, guilty and done for; nevertheless, I wished to spare him the mere detail of a formal execution.  I don’t pretend to explain the reasons of my desire—­I don’t think I could; but if you haven’t got a sort of notion by this time, then I must have been very obscure in my narrative, or you too sleepy to seize upon the sense of my words.  I don’t defend my morality.  There was no morality in the impulse which induced me to lay before him Brierly’s