It seemed a long and expensive journey to take for so short a stay; but doubtless he had business reasons, and the matter dropped from my mind.
When we returned, three or four weeks later, he was no longer in Rangoon apparently, and I did not expect to come upon his tracks again.
The Burmese lady explained the Gröne mystery with some bitterness, and no wonder!
Having come out free, upon the understanding with her, already mentioned, she had taken a room for him at the hotel, and had busied herself in buying blankets and a carpet and other small luxuries, to break the Mandalay monastery to him as gently as possible.
When three days passed and he made no sign of moving on, she quietly intimated that it might be as well to begin the new life without delay, and said she had written to her brother, himself a priest in the monastery, to meet Dr Gröne at Mandalay and present him to the authorities at the monastery.
This must probably have been about the time that I asked him innocently how long he would be staying in Rangoon.
His plan had doubtless been to go to Mandalay in a dilettante sort of fashion, and to live in the monastery for a time, with the hope of getting access to some valuable and little known MSS.; but it did not suit his plans at all to be met at once by the brother of his benefactress, and kept under the eye of this priest, who knew exactly the circumstances under which he had been enabled to take the long journey from Marseilles.
Being evidently a prudent man, he determined to seize the first opportunity for retreat from an impossible situation. How he raised enough money for the return voyage is not known. My Burmese acquaintance thought he must have applied to one of the Consulates, and that his university position would doubtless ensure his raising a loan.
Anyway, he shipped himself surreptitiously once more on board the Devonshire, and arranged that the letter, containing the usual excuse of a "sudden telegram from Marseilles announcing the unexpected death of a near relation," should not be handed to his benefactress until the anchor was safely weighed.
It was not a pleasant story, and treachery is no less perfidious for having an intellectual motive. I felt glad that Dr Gröne was not a fellow-countryman.