He held it admiringly at arm's length, as I relit mine. Then he smoked on in silence, but very slowly and caressingly, for some minutes longer. At length he said musingly:
"I wonder how long it is since I smoked my last cigar? How long is it since I came out here? I'm losing count of the years, and I've just about forgotten Oxford and London, and the wine and the women, and the old country altogether. All but one woman and one village.... I suppose you couldn't put a fellow in the way of forgetting them?"
I was still wondering what on earth to say to him—for once more I seemed to detect a wistful ring in his voice—when he settled the question himself by laughing in my face.
"How could you help me when you don't know the yarn?" he asked, with his blue eyes full of amusement. "Look here, I've a good mind to inflict it on you!"
"Wouldn't that hurt?" I could not help asking him.
"Nothing hurts now," he answered, with a queer, quiet sort of swagger in his tone and manner. "If anything ever did hurt, it's what I'm thinking of now; it might hurt less if I told you something about it."
"Then go on by all means. You may trust me to hold my tongue."
"My good fellow, why should you? Tell whom you like. It makes no difference. Nothing has made any difference for years. Besides, it's well enough known in the old country, though I've never spoken of it, drunk or sober, out here. I can't think why I should want to speak of it now—but I do."
He leant towards me and paused, admiring the white unbroken ash of his cigar, and half smiling. That half-smile was to me the saddest feature of a narrative of which it was the constant accompaniment. The tragic story which affected me so deeply seemed simply to interest the man who had brought the tragedy about. He told it in the fewest and the coolest words.