rmation," he said; "you will never consent to have any
disinterested conversation."

She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon
something personal. But this time she assented, and said that she knew
she was eager for facts. "One must make hay while the sun shines," she
added. "I must lay up a store of learning against dark days. Somehow,
my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome
indefinitely."

He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might
have said to her--what it seemed impossible to say--that fortune
possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have
been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain,
"Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!"

But all the accusations were not his. He had been watching, once, during
some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out
of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page.
It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had
not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic. The
simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science.
In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of
self-effacement. Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at
him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the Murray
slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance
that he made no movement to pick it up.

"You are singularly inconsistent, Mr. Mallet," she said.

"How?"

"That first day that we were in Saint Peter's you said things that
inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only
wanted a little push; yours was a great one; here I am in mid-ocean! And
now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me."

"Distinctly, then," said Rowland, "I strike you as inconsistent?"

"That is the word."

"Then I have played my part very ill."

"Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?"

He hesitated a moment. "That of usefulness, pure and simple."

"I don't understand you!" she said; and picking up her Murray, she
fairly buried herself in it.

That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her
perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention. "Do you
remember," he asked, "my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally
as I told you? It seeme