it was still worse. What pleasure Falk found in humbugging people in
just that way I couldn't say. It was, however, my solemn duty to warn
him. It had lately, I said, come to my knowledge that there was a man
(not a very long time ago either) who had been taken in just like this.

All this passed in undertones, and at this point Schomberg, exasperated
at our secrecy, went out of the room slamming the door with a crash
that positively lifted us in our chairs. This, or else what I had said,
huffed my Hermann, He supposed, with a contemptuous toss of his head
towards the door which trembled yet, that I had got hold of some of
that man's silly tales. It looked, indeed, as though his mind had been
thoroughly poisoned against Schomberg. "His tales were--they were," he
repeated, seeking for the word--"trash." They were trash, he reiterated,
and moreover I was young yet . . .

This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer exposed to that sort of
insult) made me huffy too. I felt ready in my own mind to back up every
assertion of Schomberg's and on any subject. In a moment, devil only
knows why, Hermann and I were looking at each other most inimically.
He caught up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the pleasure of
calling after him:

"Take my advice and make Falk pay for breaking up your ship. You aren't
likely to get anything else out of him."

When I got on board my ship later on, the old mate, who was very full of
the events of the morning, remarked:

"I saw the tug coming back from the outer Roads just before two P.M."
(He never by any chance used the words morning or afternoon. Always P.M.