opened his mouth once) he said in English: "Well. . . . Good night,
Captain Hermann." He stopped for a moment before my chair and looked
down fixedly; I may even say he glared: and he went so far as to make a
deep noise in his throat. There was in all this something so marked
that for the first time in our limited intercourse of nods and grunts he
excited in me something like interest. But next moment he disappointed
me--for he strode away hastily without a nod even.

His manner was usually odd it is true, and I certainly did not pay much
attention to it; but that sort of obscure intention, which seemed to
lurk in his nonchalance like a wary old carp in a pond, had never before
come so near the surface. He had distinctly aroused my expectations. I
would have been unable to say what it was I expected, but at all events
I did not expect the absurd developments he sprung upon me no later than
the break of the very next day.

I remember only that there was, on that evening, enough point in his
behaviour to make me, after he had fled, wonder audibly what he might
mean. To this Hermann, crossing his legs with a swing and settling
himself viciously away from me in his chair, said: "That fellow don't
know himself what he means."

There might have been some insight in such a remark. I said nothing,
and, still averted, he added: "When I was here last year he was just the
same." An eruption of tobacco smoke enveloped his head as if his temper
had exploded like gunpowder.

I had half a mind to ask him point blank whether he, at least, didn't
know why Falk, a notoriously unsociable man, had taken to visiting his
ship with such assiduity. After all, I reflected suddenly, it was a