g
to me that his secretary was his stepfather's son by another wife, when
we arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I
might have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself
as well as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank
down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my
cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table
were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that
the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly
departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its
full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was
that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy,
that he was forlorn.

'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly
dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a
homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not
know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge
instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for
him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and
after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world,
and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and
bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.'

'But have you no friends?' I ventured.

'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.'

'And no home?'

'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I
loathe it.'

'Why do you loathe it?'

'Ah! For what it has witnessed--for what it has witnessed.' He sighed.
'Suppose we discuss something else.'

You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious,
dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new
being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:

'You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
love of you.'

He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.

'Let me guess at your history,' he said. 'You have lived much alone with
your thoughts, and you have read a great d