Second Thoughts
I
As the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the dull society journal with which he had been beguiling the solitude of his after-dinner coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with an alacrity eloquent of long boredom, his possession of one of the capacious chairs which invited repose in the dingy smoking-room of an old-fashioned club. It had been reserved for him, after twenty monotonous years of almost unbroken exile, spent, for the most part, amid the jungles and swamps of Lower Burma, to realise that a friendless man, alone in the most populous city of the world, may encounter among thousands of his peers a desolation more supreme than the solitude of the most ultimate wilderness; and he found himself wondering, a little savagely, why, after all, he had expected his home-coming to be so different from the reality that now confronted him. When he landed at Brindisi, a short ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely; the fact that he was practically homeless, that, although not altogether bereft of kith and kin, he had no family circle to welcome him as an addition to its circumference, had made it inevitable that his rapid passage across the Continent should behaunted