four feet from the floor and laughed gleefully. "Can you imagine what a
funny little thing I was?"

"You must have been a wonder-child, Mrs. Camber," I replied with
sincerity; "and Ah Tsong has remained with you ever since?"

"Ever since," she echoed, shaking her head in a vaguely pathetic way.
"He will never leave me, do you think, Colin?"

"Never," replied her husband; "you are all he loves in the world. A
case, Mr. Knox," he turned to me, "of deathless fidelity rarely met
with nowadays and only possible, perhaps, in its true form in an
Oriental."

Mrs. Camber having seated herself upon one of the few chairs which was
not piled with books, her husband had resumed his place by the writing
desk, and I sought in vain to interpret the glances which passed
between them.

The fact that these two were lovers none could have mistaken. But here
again, as at Cray's Folly, I detected a shadow. I felt that something
had struck at the very root of their happiness, in fact, I wondered if
they had been parted, and were but newly reunited for there was a sort
of constraint between them, the more marked on the woman's side than on
the man's. I wondered how long they had been married, but felt that it
would have been indiscreet to ask.

Even as the idea occurred to me, however, an opportunity arose of
learning what I wished to know. I heard a bell ring, and: