plated table-spoon in the other.

"I want you to tell this young gentleman," said the doctor
deliberately, "what you told me on Wednesday morning."

Thomas looked doubtfully from one to the other.

"It was my fancy, sir," he said.

"Never mind about that. Tell us both."

"Well, sir, I didn't like it. Seemed to me when I looked in--"

("He looked in on us in the middle of the night," explained the doctor.
"Yes, go on, Thomas.")

"Seemed to me there was something queer."

"Yes?" said the doctor encouragingly.

"Something queer," repeated Thomas musingly.... "And now if you'll
excuse me, sir, I'll have to get back--"

The doctor waved his hands despairingly as Thomas scuttled back without
another word.

"It's no good," he said, "no good. And yet he told me quite
intelligibly--"

Frank was laughing quietly to himself.

"But you haven't told me one word--"

"Don't laugh," said the old man simply. "Look here, my boy, it's no
laughing matter. I tell you I can't think of anything else. It's
bothering me."

"But--"

The doctor waved his hands.

"Well," he said, "I can say it no better. It was the whole thing. The
way you looked, the way you spoke. It was most unusual. But it affected
me--it affected me in the same way; and I thought that perhaps you could
explain."

(V)

It was not until the Monday afternoon that Frank persuaded the doctor to
let him go. Dr. Whitty said everything possible, in his emphatic way, as
to the risk of traveling again too soon; and there was one scene,
actually conducted in the menagerie--the only occasion on which the
doctor mentioned Frank's relations--during which he besought the young
man to be sensible, and to allow him to communicate with his family.
Frank flatly refused, without giving reasons.

The doctor seemed strangely shy of referring again to the conversation
in the garden; and, for his part, Frank shut up like a box. They seem
both to have been extraordinarily puzzled at one another--as such people
occasionally are. They were as two persons, both intelligent and
interested, entirely divided by the absence of any common language, or
even of symbols. Words that each used meant different things to the
other. (It strikes me sometimes that the curse of Babel was a deeper
thing than appears on the surface.)

The Major and Gertie, all this while, were in clover. The doctor had no
conception of what six hours' manual work could or could not do, and, in
return for