I went to the South Pacific, after all.
Farrell called on me, next day, and before I could countermand my passage. He came, as he said, to offer me his deep apologies. "I grant you, Sir Roderick, that I behaved ill to you and Mr. Collingwood, and specially to Miss Denistoun. I had no business to drag her into the talk.… But I'm only a learner in the ways gentlemen behave. It doesn't come to me by nature, as it comes to luckier ones, whose parents and grandparents have bred it into the bone. You may put it that I've hair on my hoof and have to shave it carefully. What taking trouble can do I can make it do, and don't count the time wasted. But it's the unexpected that catches out a man like me.… You see, I came up thinking to find you alone: and I was so keen to see you, I paid no attention to the dog, queerly as he was behaving. I thought, maybe, he'd smelt a cat. There weren't any cats on the island, or aboard the I'll Away, or the cars, or the Oceanic.… And then I burst in after the hound, as soon as I realised that he meant mischief of some sort; and, of a sudden, there was Foe face to face with me, and you others treating him friendly as friendly. Was it any wonder that, coming on him like that and after hunting him more than half the world across, I let myself go?"
"Well, first of all," I answered coldly, "you may disabuse your mind of any notion that Mr. Collingwood and I were chatting with Doctor Foe in the way you suspect. As a matter of fact, after you left, we told him what we were trying to avoid telling him in Miss Denistoun's presence at the moment when you broke in—that, through his treatment of you, he had forfeited our friendship."
"Had he come to hear that?" asked Farrell,—"if it's a fair question."
"It's a perfectly fair question," said I, "and the answer is that he had not. He had come to give me in person some information for which I had written to him.… Can you guess? It was the precise latitude and longitude of your island.… And now, question for question. You hadn't tracked him here, for you have just said that your finding him in this room took you fairly by surprise."
"Almost knocked me over," Farrell agreed.
"Then what had been your purpose in calling on me?" I asked, "—if that, too, is a fair question."
"Well, I'll admit I was calling, in part, to get his address or discover his whereabouts. But that wasn't my only reason. My real reason and foremost—But before I tell it, Sir Roderick, will you answer me yet another question? Was it true, what Mr. Collingwood said?—that you were actually packing to search for me?"
"Mr. Collingwood," I answered, somewhat embarrassed, "certainly would not have said it if it hadn't been true."
"Well, it fairly beat me," said Farrell, staring. "And it beats me again, now you confirm it. Searching for me?—Why? You couldn't have guessed there was money in it."