heavily into a chair. The Jap picked up the revolver and, quietly
replacing it in the drawer from which it had been taken, left the
room, noiseless as he had entered it. He seemed to know
intuitively that it would be left where he put it.

Alone, Craven leaned forward with a groan, burying his face in his
hands.

At last he sat up wearily and his eyes fell on the letters lying
unopened on the table beside him. He fingered them listlessly and
then threw them down again while he searched his pockets absently
for the missing cigarette case. Remembering, he jerked himself to
his feet with an exclamation of pain. Was all life henceforward to
be a series of torturing recollections? He swore, and flung his
head up angrily. Coward! whining already like a kicked cur!

He got a cigarette from a near table and picking up the letters
carried them out on to the verandah to read. There were two, both
registered. The handwriting on one envelope was familiar and his
eyes widened as he looked at it. He opened it first. It was
written from Florence and dated three months earlier. With no
formal beginning it straggled up and down the sides of various
sheets of cheap foreign paper, the inferior violet ink almost
indecipherable in places.

"I wonder in what part of the globe this letter will find you?
I have been trying to write to you for a long time--and always
putting it off--but they tell me now that if I am to write at
all there must be no more _manana_. They have cried 'wolf'
so often in the last few months that I had grown sceptical,