I stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured,
but I couldn't help pronouncing him a man of unstable moods. He
had been free with me in a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now
in a mood he had turned indifferent. This general levity helped me
to believe that, so far as the subject of the tip went, there
wasn't much in it. I contrived however to make him answer a few
more questions about it, though he did so with visible impatience.
For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so blank about was
vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan,
something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly
approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself.
"It's the very string," he said, "that my pearls are strung on!"
The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn't want to
give us a grain of succour--our density was a thing too perfect in
its way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending on it, and
if the spell was to break it must break by some force of its own.
He comes back to me from that last occasion--for I was never to
speak to him again--as a man with some safe preserve for sport. I
wondered as I walked away where he had got HIS tip.
CHAPTER V.
When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he
made me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an
insult.
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