“I am not even a sportsman,” he confessed once, half apologetically, in reply to a question from his guest.  “I have passed down the great rivers of the world without a thought of salmon, and I have driven through the forest lands and across the mountains behind a giant locomotive, without a thought of the beasts which might be lurking there, waiting to be killed.  My only desire has been to reach the next place where men and women were.”

“Irrespective of nationality?” Francis queried.

“Absolutely.  I have never minded much of what race—­I have the trick of tongues rather strangely developed—­but I like the feeling of human beings around me.  I like the smell and sound and atmosphere of a great city.  Then all my senses are awake, but life becomes almost turgid in my veins during the dreary hours of passing from one place to another.”

“Do you rule out scenery as well as sport from amongst the joys of travel?” Francis enquired.

“I am ashamed to make such a confession,” his host answered, “but I have never lingered for a single unnecessary moment to look at the most wonderful landscape in the world.  On the other hand, I have lounged for hours in the narrowest streets of Pekin, in the markets of Shanghai, along Broadway in New York, on the boulevards in Paris, outside the Auditorium in Chicago.  These are the obvious places where humanity presses the thickest, but I know of others.  Some day we will talk of them.”

Francis, too, although that evening, through sheer lack of sympathy, he refused to admit it, shared to some extent Hilditch’s passionate interest in his fellow-creatures, and notwithstanding the strange confusion of thought into which he had been thrown during the last twenty-four hours, he felt something of the pungency of life, the thrill of new and appealing surroundings, as he sat in his high-backed chair, sipping his wonderful wine, eating almost mechanically what was set before him, fascinated through all his being by his strange company.

For three days he had cast occasional glances at this man, seated in the criminal dock with a gaoler on either side of him, his fine, nervous features gaining an added distinction from the sordidness of his surroundings.  Now, in the garb of civilisation, seated amidst luxury to which he was obviously accustomed, with a becoming light upon his face and this strange, fascinating flow of words proceeding always from his lips, the man, from every external point of view, seemed amongst the chosen ones of the world.  The contrast was in itself amazing.  And then the woman!  Francis looked at her but seldom, and when he did it was with a curious sense of mental disturbance; poignant but unanalysable.