If only Torp were back, now!' But Torpenhow was in the south of England, inspecting dockyards in the company of the Nilghai.

His letters were brief and full of mystery.
Dick had never asked anybody to help him in his joys or his sorrows.

He argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him.

'I can't call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me.

I must pull through this business alone,' he said.