Heywood clapped him on the shoulder, and gave a queer cough.

"If that's all, never you fear! I'll teach you your guard. 'Once in a
while we can finish in style.' Eh?--Rudie, you blooming German, I--I
think we must have been brothers! We'll pull it off yet."

Heywood spoke with a strange alacrity, and tried again to cough. This
time, however, there was no mistake--he was laughing.

Rudolph shot at him one glance of startled unbelief, and then, tossing
his head, marched on without a word. Pride and loneliness overwhelmed
him. The two at his side were no companions--not even presences. He
went alone, conscious only of the long flood of sunset, and the black
interlacing pattern of bamboos. The one friendly spirit had deserted,
laughing; yet even this last and worst of earthly puzzles did not
matter. It was true, what he had read; this, which they called death,
was a lonely thing.

On a broken stone bench, Sturgeon, sober and dejected, with puffy
circles under his eyes, sat waiting. A long parcel, wrapped in green
baize, lay across his knees. He nodded gloomily, without rising. At his
feet wandered a path, rankly matted with burnt weeds, and bordered with
green bottle-ends, the "dimples" choked with discs of mud. The place was
a deserted garden, where the ruins of a European house--burnt by natives
in some obscure madness, years ago--sprawled in desolation among wild
shrubs. A little way down the path stood Teppich and Chantel, each with
his back turned and his hands clasped, like a pair of sulky Napoleons,
one fat, one slender. The wooden pretense of their attitude set Rudolph,
for an instant, to laughing silently and bitterly. This final
scene,--what justice, that it should be a mean waste, the wreck of silly