The train rolled into the station-shadows, and stopped.
“Because,” she was saying in my ear, as we moved slowly out into the
corridor, “hard as he was sometimes, and positive, and all shaken and
tortured, even he knew the real things when he found them, Anthony. It
would have hurt him, but he would have been fair--once he could really
get it clear.” And she whispered, right there in the corridor of the
car, with passengers crowding behind us and before--“I'm so glad he knew
it was _you!_”
Hindmann tells me that we passed Sir Robert to-day in the railway
station at Tientsin. It seems that that old man and I actually brushed
sleeves.
I did n't know this. Did n't see him at all, in fact. But Hindmann
says he looked straight at me, without the slightest sign of
recognition--first at Heloise and then at me.
He had a young woman with him; a rather good-looking girlish person,
very thin, but “with a way about her.” Hindmann has seen her before. He
thinks she ran a gambling club in Macao when he was last on the Coast.
Sir Robert himself impressed him as looking extremely old and not a
little feeble, with a slight paralysis that has twisted his face up
curiously on the left side.