'Look at my watch!' said the gentleman in the light suit, and as there were vacant places beside Mrs. Sidebottom, the two gentlemen left pacing the deck and seated themselves on the bench near her.

'Look at my watch!—Turned black, positively black, as if I had kept it against a vulcanized india-rubber stomach-belt. If you want evidence—there it is. I haven't cleaned it. No, I keep it as a memorial to me to be thankful to the beneficent Heaven which carried me through—which carried me through.'

Mrs. Sidebottom saw a silver watch-case extended to be exhibited, the dingy colour that silver acquires when exposed to gas.

'I wish, sir—I beg your pardon, my lord—you will excuse me, but by accident—by the merest accident—I caught sight of your address and name on your luggage—I wish, my lord, I were going with you to Andermatt, and I would take you a promenade round the backs of the hotels, and let you smell—smell, my lord—as rich a bouquet of accumulated deleterious odours as could be gathered into one—odours, my lord, diphtheritical, typhoidiacal. You see my face—I have become mottled through blood-poisoning. I was gangrened at Andermatt by the deadly vapours there. I thank a merciful Heaven, with my strong constitution and by the warning afforded by my watch, I escaped death. I always carry about with me a silver timepiece, not one of gold, for sanitary reasons—the silver warns me of the presence in the atmosphere of sulphuretted hydrogen—of sewage gas—it blackens, as the arm of Lady Thingabob—I forget her name, perhaps she was of your lordship's family—as the arm, the wrist of her ladyship, was blackened by the grip of a spectre. I see you are bound for the Hôtel du Grand Prince. I went there, and there I inhaled the vapours of death, or rather of disease. I moved to the Hôtel Impérial, and was saved. There, and there only, the drainage is after English models, and there, and there only are you safe from the fumes of typhoid, the seeds of typhus, the corpuscles of diphtheria, and the—the—the what-d'ye-call-ems of cholera. You will excuse my speaking to you, perhaps, forcing myself—unworthy—on your distinguished self.'

'Oh, certainly, certainly.'

'But when I saw your name, my lord, and considered what you are, and what the country would lose were you to run the risk unforewarned, that I ran, I ventured to thrust myself upon you.'

'I am really most obliged to you.'

'Well—who is it said "We are all one flesh, and so feel sympathy one with another"? Having suffered, my lord, suffered so recently, and seeing you, my lord, you, you—about—but there—not another word, Homo sum, nil humamim—but I forget the rest, it is long since I was at school, and I have not kept up my classics.'

'I really am most indebted to you—and you think that the Hôtel Impérial——'

'I am sure of it. I had my blood tested, I had my breath analyzed. There were diatoms in one, and bacilli in the other, and—I am alive, alive to say it; thanks to the salubrious air and the careful nursing of the Hôtel Impérial.'