'

'Of course!' said Kauffer, 'but I sink I sell you that Porcha; it is ze
best of ze two.'

Chapter 2.VI.

I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed for
me upon Armour's affairs to myself. The whole thing considered in
connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too derogatory and
disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury
in the mere statement. But there came a point when I could no longer
listen to Dora Harris's theories to account for him, wild idealizations
as most of them were of any man's circumstances and intentions. 'Why
don't you ask him point-blank?' I said, and she replied, frowning
slightly, 'Oh, I couldn't do that. It would destroy something--I don't
know what, but something valuable--between us.' This struck me as
an exaggeration, considering how far, by that time, they must have
progressed towards intimacy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me
without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she
was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The
touch of comedy I gave the whole thing--surely I was justified in
that!--fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of rebuke;
one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor devil.

At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she turned a
calm, considering eye upon me.

'You have known this for a fortnight?' she asked. 'That doesn't seem
somehow quite fair.'

'To whom?' I asked, and her answer startled me.

'To either of us,' she said.

How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine, but
the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.

'Oh, confound it!' I exclaimed. 'I couldn't help finding out, you know.'

'But you could help keeping it to yourself in that--in that base way,'
she replied, and almost--the evening light was beginning to glimmer
uncertainly through the deodars--I could swear I saw the flash of a tear
on her eyelid.

'I beg your pardon,' she went on a moment later, 'but I do hate having
to pity him. It's intolerable--that.'

I picked up a dainty edition of Aucassin and Nicolette with the
intention of getting upon ground less emotional, and observed on the
flyleaf 'D.H. from I.A. In memory of the Hill of Stars.' I looked
appreciatively at the binding, and as soon as possible put it down.

'He was not bound to tell me,' Dora asserted presently, in reply to my
statemen