"I deserved all I got there. It would have helped, though. You and Jennifer were too good and too far-off for me." He shrugged his shoulders with a slight laugh. "But I had to come back to you," he said.
Tempest did not ask what had brought him back. That was Dick's own arrangement with his God—if he had one.
"And you have the right to come back now," he said. "Did you know that Ducane is dead?"
"I have had a letter from her telling me. I wrote her from Macpherson." It was Tempest's silence drew the next words out of him. "She is waiting at Grey Wolf until I come. It rather frightens one to know how much a woman can forgive."
"So long as you stay frightened you'll be all right," said Tempest dryly. Then he came over, standing close by Dick's chair.
"I am a brute to say such things to you," he said with his old impetuosity. "You saved me, and nearly lost yourself over doing it. That should make us quits. You didn't know what was going to come out of it."
"I don't know that I cared, after the first. And you have surely more humour than to make apologies to me." Dick pushed his chair back, and stood up. "I think you're wanted. Someone has been perambulating the passage and coughing discreetly for the last three minutes."
Tempest turned to the door. But he looked back.
"You'll give me all the days you can spare, won't you, Dick?" he asked.
"I shall be glad to," said Dick briefly.
But under the bald words both men felt the pull of that old bond of friendship again. It was not broken, and it would not break now. Dick knew this certainly as he went out to smoke a pipe along the sunny beach, and he felt surprisedly that he was glad, really glad, although joy and he had been strangers so long. Even Jennifer's letter had not made him glad, for its sweet unreproachful wisdom had humbled him into the dust. And the Commissioner's letter had not made him glad. It had made him thankful. He smiled a little, thinking of it. There was quite evidently something of the woman in the Commissioner too. Or perhaps it was because he had had such
