I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of the blond-haired man upon my arm.

I looked up to discover the botanist had gone into the inn.

The blond-haired man was for a moment almost stripped of pose.

“I say,” he said. “Weren’t you listening to me?”

“No,” I said bluntly.

His surprise was manifest. But by an effort he recalled what he had meant to say.

“Your friend,” he said, “has been telling me, in spite of my sustained interruptions, a most incredible story.”

I wondered how the botanist managed to get it in. “About that woman?” I said.

“About a man and a woman who hate each other and can’t get away from each other.”

“I know,” I said.

“It sounds absurd.”

“It is.”

“Why can’t they get away? What is there to keep them together? It’s ridiculous. I——”

“Quite.”

“He would tell it to me.”

“It’s his way.”

“He interrupted me. And there’s no point in it. Is he ——” he hesitated, “mad?”

“There’s a whole world of people mad with him,” I answered after a pause.

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It is vain to deny that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry, visibly if not verbally. “Dear me!” he said, and took up something he had nearly forgotten. “And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountain side? . . . I thought you were joking.”

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. At least I meant my manner to be earnest, but to him it may have seemed wild.

“You,” I said, “are an original sort of man. Do not be alarmed. Perhaps you will understand. . . . We were not joking.”

“But, my dear fellow!”

“I mean it! We come from an inferior world! Like this, but out of order.”

“No world could be more out of order ——”

“You play at that and have your fun. But there’s no limit to the extent to which a world of men may get out of gear. In our world ——”

He nodded, but his eye had ceased to be friendly.

“Men die of starvation; people die by the hundred thousand needlessly and painfully; men and women are lashed together to make hell for each other; children are born — abominably, and reared in cruelty and folly; there is a thing called war, a horror of blood and vileness. The whole thing seems to me at times a cruel and wasteful wilderness of muddle. You in this decent world have no means of understanding ——”

“No?” he said, and would have begun, but I went on too quickly.

“No! When I see you dandering through this excellent and hopeful world, objecting, obstructing, and breaking the law, displaying your wit on science and order, on the men who toil so ingloriously to swell and use the knowledge that is salvation, this salvation for which our poor world cries to heaven ——”

“You don’t mean to say,” he said, “that you really come from some other world where things are different and worse?”

“I do.”

“And you want to talk to me about it instead of listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, nons............