“I can’t smoke cigars. They make me sick.”

“Well, it beats me—” Sir Reginald meekly put away the cigar-case. “You’ve got a job, you haven’t got a girl to treat you badly, and you don’t need five pounds. And yet you try to jump in the River. It doesn’t make sense.”

At this point, Chantrell cracked up entirely. With a smothered sob he collapsed on the stone step beside the pedestal and buried his face in his hands. Sir Reginald stood regarding such indecent spiritual nakedness in some dismay. He found it difficult to believe that people behaved this way except on the films. All his social reflexes inclined him to apologize and back out, as though he had opened the wrong door.

“Stick to it, sir,” Hilary encouraged him from beside the column at a little distance from them. “This wants handling.”

Sir Reginald considered Chantrell solemnly a moment more, and then sat down beside him with a slight grunt on the lower step.

“Very well, let’s philosophize together,” he suggested. “Or would you rather go somewhere and have a drink? There’s a little place over there in Villiers Street—”

“Please leave me alone,” begged John Chantrell, and he meant it. “I’ll be all right.”

“Oh, no.” Sir Reginald settled himself more firmly on the step. “Not now, I can’t. The Orientals say that when you have saved a man’s life it belongs henceforth to you. So I have the right to make a damn’ nuisance of myself in your life for the rest of my days, and I intend to start now. ’Tisn’t just morbid curiosity, my boy—whatever brought you to such a pass, and so forth—none of that. Though I must admit that at my age it seems a futile gesture voluntarily to leave this interesting world in search of a purely problematical peace.” He paused. “Why did you want to do that, laddie?”

“I was all right,” said John Chantrell sullenly, “until I suddenly looked up and caught it—smiling!” He gestured upward contemptuously at the sphinx above them.

“As though it knew all the answers.” Hilary glanced up into the sphinx’s face, and for a moment they seemed to look into each other’s eyes, smiling the same small smile. “And it won’t tell. And you’re not allowed to look in the back of the book.” The whole situation had a dream-like quality which was beginning to puzzle him. It was a queer homecoming—a queer sort of night altogether, with these two oddities perched absurdly on the step, absorbed in their argument, taking no more notice of him than if he had been invisible. Perhaps it was a dream, and he would wake up soon in his narrow bed in Peshawur....

“Well, what if it does smile?” Sir Reginald was propounding reasonably. “What’s the matter with that?”

“Please let me alone.”