ot one bit. I was only--sorry. I didn't mean to be unkind or to
repeat anything I shouldn't. Why are you vexed?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and snapped the scissors over a coil of
string.

"Oh, nothing. Gets on one's nerves a bit that's all. He's such a fine
fellow, he would have been such a brick, but that wretched lameness has
spoiled it all. Till he was eighteen he was as strong as a horse--a
fine, upstanding young giant he must have been. Then came the
accident--pitched from his horse against a stone wall--and for twelve
solid years he lay on his back. That made him only thirty, but you
would never have believed it to see him. He was a lot more like a man
of fifty."

Pixie laid her pen on the table, and rested her chin in the clasped
hands. Her eyes looked very large and wistful.

"Twelve years on one's back would be pretty long. One would live so
fast _inside_ all the while one's body was idle. 'Twould age you. If
it had happened when he was fifty, 'twould have been easier, but at
eighteen one feels so lively and awake. Anything, _anything_ would seem
better than to do just nothing! To wake each morning and know there was
nothing before one all the long hours, but to lie still! Other people
would get accustomed to it for you--that would be one of the bits which
would hurt the most--for you'd never be accustomed yourself. And which
would be worst, do you think--the days when it was dull and the room was
dark, or the days when the sun blazed, begging him to come out?"

Stanor shook himself with an involuntary shiver.

"Don't!" he cried sharply. "Don't talk like that! What an imagination
you have! I've been enough cut up about it, goodness knows, but I never
realised all that it meant. ... Well! He is better now, so we needn't
grouse about it any more. It's only that's it's left a mark! He was
turned in a moment from a boy into an old man--his youth was killed,
_and he can't get it back_! That's one reason why he's so jolly anxious
about me. Like most fellows he sets an exaggerated value on the things
he has missed himself, and it's a craze with him to--as he calls
it--`safeguard my youth.' He is trying to live his own lost days again
through me, poor fellow, and it's a poor game. Outsiders take for
granted that I'm his heir, but that's bosh. Fellows of thirty-five
don't worry about heirs. He has never mentioned the subject; all he
_has_ done is to give me every chance in the way o