«
    »Yes. All was quiet on this side. Mrs. Gould has taken the two girls with
her.«
    Charles Gould rode on, and the engineer-in-chief followed the doctor
indoors.
    »That man is calmness personified,« he said, appreciatively, dropping on a
bench, and stretching his well-shaped legs in cycling stockings nearly across
the doorway. »He must be extremely sure of himself.«
    »If that's all he is sure of, then he is sure of nothing,« said the doctor.
He had perched himself again on the end of the table. He nursed his cheek in the
palm of one hand, while the other sustained the elbow. »It is the last thing a
man ought to be sure of.« The candle, half-consumed and burning dimly with a
long wick, lighted up from below his inclined face, whose expression affected by
the drawn-in cicatrices in the cheeks, had something vaguely unnatural, an
exaggerated remorseful bitterness. As he sat there he had the air of meditating
upon sinister things. The engineer-in-chief gazed at him for a time before he
protested.
    »I really don't see that. For me there seems to be nothing else. However -«
    He was a wise man, but he could not quite conceal his contempt for that sort
of paradox; in fact, Dr. Monygham was not liked by the Europeans of Sulaco. His
outward aspect of an outcast, which he preserved even in Mrs. Gould's
drawing-room, provoked unfavourable criticism. There could be no doubt of his
intelligence; and as he had lived for over twenty years in the country, the
pessimism of his outlook could not be altogether ignored. But instinctively, in
self-defence of their activities and hopes, his hearers put it to the account of
some hidden imperfection in the man's character. It was known that many years
before, when quite young, he had been made by Guzman Bento chief medical officer
of the army. Not one of the Europeans then in the service of Costaguana had been
so much liked and trusted by the fierce old Dictator.
    Afterwards his story was not so clear. It lost itself amongst the
innumerable tales of conspiracies and plots against the tyrant as a stream is
lost in an arid belt of sandy country before it emerges, diminished and
troubled, perhaps, on the other side. The doctor made no secret of it that he
had lived for years in the wildest parts of the Republic, wandering with almost
unknown Indian tribes in the great
