Page:Conrad - Lord Jim, 1900.djvu/210

 so well, at the tone of the letter, at my own cleverness. Evidently I had known what I was doing. I had read characters aright, and so on. And what if something unexpected and wonderful were to come of it? That evening, reposing in a deck-chair under the shade of my own poop awning (it was in Hong-Kong harbour), I laid on Jim's behalf the first stone of a castle in Spain.

“I made a trip to the northward, and when I returned I found another letter from my friend waiting for me. It was the first envelope I tore open. ‘There are no spoons missing, as far as I know,’ ran the first line; ‘I haven't been interested enough to inquire. He is gone, leaving on the breakfast - table a formal little note of apology, which is either silly or heartless. Probably both — and it's all one to me. Allow me to say, lest you should have some more mysterious young men in reserve, that I have shut up shop, definitely and for ever. This is the last eccentricity I shall be guilty of. Do not imagine for a moment that I care a hang; but he is very much regretted at tennis-parties, and for my own sake I've told a plausible lie at the club. . . .’ I flung the letter aside and started looking through the batch on my table, till I came upon Jim's handwriting. Would you believe it? One chance in a hundred ! But it is always that hundredth chance ! That little second engineer of the Patna had turned up in a more or less destitute state and got a temporary job of looking after the machinery of the mill. ‘I couldn't stand the familiarity of the little beast,’ Jim wrote from a seaport seven hundred miles south of the