Mr. Endacott smiled thinly.
“Thirty years,” he reminded her, “is a long way to look back. To pick up the threads, the friendships dropped more than a quarter of a century ago, is not easy. At the same time,” he went on, “it is right that I should return to England. It marches well with affairs here.”
“You must have found the life out in these parts very interesting, sir,” Gregory Ballaston remarked. “I don’t know whether it would get monotonous to you, but to any one coming upon it suddenly it is an amazing corner of the world. Off the ship, I have only seen three Europeans since I have been here.”
“It is for that reason,” Mr. Endacott pointed out, “an unsuitable place for my niece. My establishment here, too, is impossible. No European woman could keep house under the prevailing conditions. That is why I am hurrying my niece off, although I myself shall follow before long.”
“My father will be interested to see you again,” Gregory ventured.
“Your father, if his tastes had lain that way,” Mr. Endacott ruminated, “might have been a brilliant scholar. He preferred sport and life. We met, not so many years ago, in Pekin. He was dabbling in diplomacy then. He certainly had the gifts for it. He was, in fact, the most popular Englishman who ever appeared at the Court there. He was received and granted privileges where I could never follow him. He was, I suppose, your instigator in this buccaneering expedition of yours.”
The young man laughed a little uneasily. There had been a vein of contempt in the other’s tone.
“I suppose it must have seemed a horrible piece of vandalism to you, sir,” he remarked. “However, there it is. The adventure appealed to me and we wanted the money badly enough.”
His host looked out across the harbour at the swaying lanterns of the small boats and beyond to the great lighthouse.
“Money!” he repeated. “The password of the West. Somehow I never thought I should return to it.”