“Yes,” said Burton slowly.  “I may be a bit tired of Singapore.  It’s a queer thing, though, that you fellows have drifted back here again.  The call of the East is no fable.  It’s a call that one hears for ever.”

The conversation drifted into another channel, and all sorts of topics were discussed, from racing to the latest feminine fashions, from ballroom dances to the merits and demerits of coalition government.  Then suddenly: 

“What became of Adderley?” asked Jennings.

There were several men in the party who had been cronies of ours during the time that we were stationed in Singapore, and at Jennings’s words a sort of hush seemed to fall on those who had known Adderley.  I cannot say if Jennings noticed this, but it was perfectly evident to me that Dr. Matheson had perceived it, for he glanced swiftly across in my direction in an oddly significant way.

“I don’t know,” replied Burton, who was an engineer.  “He was rather an unsavoury sort of character in some ways, but I heard that he came to a sticky end.”

“What do you mean?” I asked with curiosity, for I myself had often wondered what had become of Adderley.

“Well, he was reported to his C. O., or something, wasn’t he, just before the time for his demobilization?  I don’t know the particulars; I thought perhaps you did, as he was in your regiment.”

“I have heard nothing whatever about it,” I replied.

“You mean Sidney Adderley, the man who was so indecently rich?” someone interjected.  “Had a place at Katong, and was always talking about his father’s millions?”

“That’s the fellow.”

“Yes,” said Jennings, “there was some scandal, I know, but it was after my time here.”

“Something about an old mandarin out Johore Bahru way, was it not?” asked Burton.  “The last thing I heard about Adderley was that he had disappeared.”

“Nobody would have cared much if he had,” declared Jennings.  “I know of several who would have been jolly glad.  There was a lot of the brute about Adderley, apart from the fact that he had more money than was good for him.  His culture was a veneer.  It was his check-book that spoke all the time.”

“Everybody would have forgiven Adderley his vulgarity,” said Dr. Matheson, quietly, “if the man’s heart had been in the right place.”

“Surely an instance of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” someone murmured.

Burton gazed rather hard at the last speaker.

“So far as I am aware,” he said, “the poor devil is dead, so go easy.”

“Are you sure he is dead?” asked Dr. Matheson, glancing at Burton in that quizzical, amused way of his.

“No, I am not sure; I am merely speaking from hearsay.  And now I come to think of it, the information was rather vague.  But I gathered that he had vanished, at any rate, and remembering certain earlier episodes in his career, I was led to suppose that this vanishing meant------”