asked unexpectedly. "I usually have a cup at this time of the day, and I'd like to talk over old times."

Not a sign that he believed that I was pretending to know him! Not a ghost of a suggestion that he thought I had mistaken him for some one else!

For a moment I wondered. He had rather a good accent. There was something about his way of talking that I seemed to recognise. But no! I could never have known this fellow. "What have you done with Anne?" he asked next.

I admit I was taken aback

by this. It had come as curious shock when he greeted me by name; to hear him referring to my wife as Anne staggered me.

Pulling myself together-for I was not prepared to back out now the whole affair had roused my curiosity-I replied in as natural a voice as I could manage

"Anne? She had a headache, and preferred to stay on board until we sail."

"On board?" echoed the stranger. "I had imagined you were staying here with friends."

what pathetic, harmless-looking creature.

"A way-port!" he sighed, after ordering coffee. "It's turned out to be a terminus for a good many fellows like me."

"It must be rather dreadful to be stranded here, or anywhere in Brazil," I suggested tentatively, and was surprised at his sudden defence of Rio and Brazil.

"It is not," he declared. "Rio is a warm-hearted town. Not for nothing she flaunts these vivid colours, this extravagant pageant of palmleaf and burning sky. It's symbolic, man-symbolic of all the primitive warmth of heart and boundless generosity driven from other lands by fog and cold wind. Brazil! A shower of rain, here, and green hands filled with fruit spring from the ground to serve you. As if at a signal, the sun drops below the horizon, and the baked earth, still warm and glowing, offers itself, a perfumed bed, to rest on. There are a million new stars in the arched ceiling above you; the very moon is twice as big. It's an enchanted land . . .'

He rambled on in this extraordinary vein for some time, and little by little his exalted phrases began to fascinate me; there vanished a certain selfconsciousness that had at first troubled me as I listened to his uncolloquial flow of language; his words created exotic pictures in my mind; I was filled with an absurd desire to join in his perfervid eulogy, to sing

the praises of this Rio and Brazil that I had known but a scant hour or so, to convey to him the absolute sympathy and understanding with which I heard him. Yea, to dazzle him with verbiage!

"You're right!" I cried, struggling desperately with words and phrases that eluded me. "Right. That's how I feel about it, too. I know what you mean. Rio. The colours and the heat and the smells. Extraordinary. They fascinate me also. I think if ever-if ever—'

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"You understand me," interrupted the stranger eagerly, and leant forward with a gleam in his eye. The warmth. That's partly it. Your London and your northern cities-a man might hide there, forget himself, and be forgotten-but he would freeze to death. And food. This is a land of abund

ance.

You can always find something. The people are friendly-poor ignorant halfbreed creatures that they are. Oh, I tell you, man, this is a friendly city! At times I've been happy here."

"If ever," I said-" if ever anything happened to me— anything terrible, catastrophical-I should run here to hide and forget."

"And you're lucky to know of it," said the stranger in tensely. "Lucky. God! the things I went through before I drifted into this place! The cruelty of man to man! Rain and sleet and grey skies. This place has seemed like heaven.

my tale," he said briskly. "It is a thing that comes quite naturally to me. Before the drink got hold of me, I was a writer."

His history, lightly and almost impersonally sketched, was a sordid and familiar tale; but he told it with such selfderisive wit, such flashes of gaiety, that it held me absorbed.

The artistic temperament, a love of the dramatic in and out of season, together with a taste for women and wine, had brought him where he was. I felt filled with pity and sympathy, oddly moved.

"It's been most awfully good of you, a perfect stranger, to tell me all this," I said, groping about for something to say. He seemed to freeze.

"It has been very good of you, a complete stranger, to listen so patiently to things that cannot possibly have interested

"But they have interested me!" I cried. "Enormously. It is- Good Lord! then

you have known all the time

that I was pretending to know you?"

He nodded coldly, looked away, and lifted a match to his cigarette stump. As he did so, I noticed how his freckled hand trembled.

For perhaps a minute we sat silently there; then he spoke suddenly.

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Have you ever known what it is to struggle with an uncontrollable sense of the dramatic and the sensational?" he asked in a tragic voice.

Just for an instant the spell he had cast over me lost its potency, and I stared across at him with fresh vision. I wondered if it was cocaine that he took. Then my curiosity surged to the surface: the sight of him fascinated me me anew. He seemed to be struggling in the clutches of some demon. He writhed and fought it. His fingers twitched and his lips quivered. Some secret piece of knowledge had filled him with excitement, and he was desperately endeavouring to hold himself in hand.

Of course, I had known all along that there was a ne'erdo-well in Anne's family, some fellow who took drugs, or drank, or embezzled money. Anne herself had never referred to him, and I had imagined him to be in Canada or Australia, a remittance man. I had never

even known whether he was her brother or just some cousin. Faint recollections of a great scandal that had taken place before I had known her lingered in my memory, that was all. These old families generally have a skeleton in the cupboard.

And this fellow was Anne's brother! Anne's brother!

I glanced up and found the seat opposite me empty. He had vanished. Darting to the door, I looked up and down the street, caught a glimpse of him hurrying away, and after a second's hesitation went out after him.

"Come back, you silly ass!" I cried, grabbing him by the elbow. What made you run away like that?"

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has been ruining me all my life. When I came a cropper at home, it seemed a fine-a dramatic thing to run off abroad, and then spread a rumour that I had died of fever on an exploring expedition. Now, not contented, I revive myself!"

He gulped and lit a thin little cigar that he found in his torn pocket. Goodness knows for what special occasion he had been hoarding that little cigar! He clutched it as a drowning man at a straw.

Honestly," he continued, "when I asked you to have coffee with me here, it was merely in order to hear a little home news. I never intended to let you know who I was." "And how did you know who I was?”

"I was on the quay when the boat came in," he explained. "I knew an old fellow on board, and he pointed you out to me as Anne's husband."

When finally we rose to leave the café, he plunged his hand into his pocket, drew out several small coins, and regarded them ruefully.

"Hm! To-day has not been one of my prosperous days," he remarked, and glanced at me with a mischievous twinkle

in his eyes. "I'm afraid I shall be obliged to touch you for five hundred reis."

Perhaps I appeared startled, for he laughed a little maliciously.

"You've been waiting for me to borrow something, eh? Don't look so scared: five

automobiles

exist side by side with silent valleys of packed fern - like trees.

When I look back on that queer interview with Mr Brown I find my memories of the emotions stirred up by it irrelevantly mixed with the memory of Rio as it presented itself to my eyes on the walk home: the painted houses clinging to the slopes and crowding in the narrow valleys; the tall fantastic peaks, draped in foam of green vegetation, girding the city round and springing up out of its very heart; the precipices looming over it, the fingers of crooked rock gesticulating across it.

A small but very real doubt was troubling me during that walk to the boat. I thrust it back into my subconscious mind, but it crept out again. I had promised Brown that I would never tell his sister that he was still living. Could I keep the matter secret? Anne was, and is, a very observant woman: she reads me like a book. Would she guess that something had happened?

Apparently it was Herbert Wilkins who told Brown that I was Anne's husband. Herbert was a large man with a damp curl on his forehead; and as first-class pantryman he took a great interest in all passengers, making a practice of delving into their private affairs, per medium of bedroom stewards and all who had an interesting tale to tell.

"I must have met this little beachcomber up in Fred Jones's dive some time or other, for I reckernised him at once," he was observing. “He ses, 'Ello as 'e meets me on the quay. ''Ello,' I ses, and we starts chatting. Know who's who?' I ses with a larf. 'I been forty-four years in this line, and I seen them all before. That pretty girl there, she's Miss Brown, as was, before she married that weak-minded bird over there. His name's Morris. Yes, she's travelled back and for'ard on this line some half a dozen times before. I could tell you all 'er 'istory, I could,' I ses with a genial smile. And I did. He seemed mighty interested in everything, being a Britisher hisself. Morris ? I ses. 'Yes, I seen him in this boat before. P'raps 'e met 'er 'ere. Yes, I seen 'im before. Sort of weak-minded 'e is. Sort of weak-minded, I should say . . .'

I had reached the cabin door by that time, and I would have turned back and asked him just what he meant by that phrase "weak-minded " if I hadn't heard sounds of my wife crying inside the room. But now I'm inclined to think that Herbert was rather a shrewd judge of human character.

Anne was wiping her eyes when I came in, and she looked at me in a peculiar way.