I partly understand your feelings, but I would impress on you
that you have nothing really to fear. Depend upon it, Smith will not
molest you in any way. You must remember he himself has had a warning;
and indeed from the brief glance I had of him, he seemed to me to be a
frightened-looking man. However, I see it is getting late, and if you
will excuse me, Mr. Wilkins, I think I will be going. I dare say we
shall often meet here." Dyson walked off smartly, pondering the strange story chance had brought
him, and finding on cool reflection that there was something a little
strange in Mr. Wilkins's manner, for which not even so weird a catalogue
of experiences could altogether account. ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. Mr. Charles Phillipps was, as has been hinted, a gentleman of pronounced
scientific tastes. In his early days he had devoted himself with fond
enthusiasm to the agreeable study of biology, and a brief monograph on
the Embryology of the Microscopic Holothuria had formed his first
contribution to the belles lettres. Later, he had somewhat relaxed the
severity of his pursuits, and had dabbled in the more frivolous subjects
of palæontology and ethnology; he had a cabinet in his sitting-room
whose drawers were stuffed with rude flint implements, and a charming
fetish from the South Seas was the dominant note in the decorative
scheme of the apartment. Flattering himself with the title of
materialist, he was in truth one of the most credulous of men, but he
required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of science before he
would give it any credit, and the wildest dreams took solid shape to him
if only the nomenclature were severe and irreproachable; he laughed at
the witch, but quailed before the powers of the hypnotist, lifting his
eyebrows when Christianity was mentioned, but adoring protyle and the
ether. For the rest, he prided himself on a boundless scepticism; the
average tale of wonder he heard with nothing but contempt, and he would
certainly not have credited a word or syllable of Dyson's story of the
pursuer and pursued unless the gold coin had been produced as visible
and tangible evidence. As it was he half suspected that Dyson had
imposed on him; he knew his friend's disordered fancies, and his habit
of conjuring up the marvellous to account for the entirely commonplace;
and on the whole he was inclined to think that the so-called facts in
the odd adventure had been gravely distorted in the telling. Since the
evening on which he had listened to the tale, he had paid Dyson a visit,
and had delivered himself of some serious talk on the necessity of
accurate observation, and the folly, as he put it, of using a
kaleidoscope instead of a telescope in the view of things, to which
remarks his friend had listened with a smile that was extremely sardonic
"My dear fellow," Dyson had remarked at last, "you will allow me to tell
you that I see your drift perfectly. However, you will be astonished to
hear that I consider you to be the visionary, while I am a sober and
serious spectator of human life. You have gone round the circle, and
while you fancy yourself far in the golden land of new philosophies, you
are in reality a dweller in a metaphorical Clapham; your scepticism has
defeated itself and become a monstrous credulity; you are in fact in the
position of the bat or owl, I forget which it was, who denied the
existence of the sun at noonday, and I shall be astonished if you do not
one day come to me full of contrition for your manifold intellectual
errors, with a humble resolution to see things in their true light for
the future." This tirade had left Mr. Phillipps unimpressed; he
considered Dyson as hopeless, and he went home to gloat over some
primitive stone implements that a friend had sent him from India. He
found that his landlady, seeing them displayed in all their rude
formlessness upon the table, had removed the collection to the dustbin,
and had replaced it by lunch; and the afternoon was spent in malodorous
research. Mrs. Brown, hearing these stones spoken of as very valuable
knives, had called him in his hearing "poor Mr. Phillipps," and between
rage and evil odors he spent a sorry afternoon. It was four o'clock
before he had completed his work of rescue; and, overpowered with the
flavors of decaying cabbage-leaves, Phillipps felt that he must have a
walk to gain an appetite for the evening meal. Unlike Dyson, he walked
fast, with his eyes on the pavement, absorbed in his thoughts and
oblivious of the life around him; and he could not have told by what
streets he had passed, when he suddenly lifted up his eyes and found
himself in Leicester Square. The grass and flowers pleased him, and he
welcomed the opportunity of resting for a few minutes, and glancing
round, he saw a bench which had only one occupant, a lady, and as she
was seated at one end, Phillipps took up a position at the other
extremity, and began to pass in angry review the events of the
afternoon. He had noticed as he came up to the bench that the person
already there was neatly dressed, and to all appearance young; her face
he could not see, as it was turned away in apparent contemplation of the
shrubs, and moreover shielded with her hand; but it would be doing
wrong to Mr. Phillipps to imagine that his choice of a seat was dictated
by any hopes of an affair of the heart; he had simply preferred the
company of one lady to that of five dirty children, and having seated
himself was immersed directly in thoughts of his misfortunes. He had
meditated changing his lodgings; but now, on a judicial review of the
case in all its bearings, his calmer judgment told him that the race of
landladies is like to the race of the leaves, and that there was but
little to choose between them. He resolved, however, to talk to Mrs.
Brown, the offender, very coolly and yet severely, to point out the
extreme indiscretion of her conduct, and to express a hope for better
things in the future. With this decision registered in his mind,
Phillipps was about to get up from the seat and move off, when he was
intensely annoyed to hear a stifled sob, evidently from the lady, who
still continued her contemplation of the shrubs and flower-beds. He
clutched his stick desperately, and in a moment would have been in full
retreat, when the lady turned her face towards him, and with a mute
entreaty bespoke his attention. She was a young girl with a quaint and
piquant rather than a beautiful face, and she was evidently in the
bitterest distress, and Mr. Phillipps sat down again, and cursed his
chances heartily. The young lady looked at him with a pair of charming
eyes of a shining hazel, which showed no trace of tears, though a
handkerchief was in her hand; she bit her lip, and seemed to struggle
with some overpowering grief, and her whole attitude was all beseeching
and imploring.