m. "But I don't care," she smiled.

"You mean I'm good enough?"

She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will
you let that settle your question for you?" And then as if making out in
his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which,
however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh you don't care
either--but very differently: you don't care for anything but yourself."

Spencer Brydon recognised it--it was in fact what he had absolutely
professed. Yet he importantly qualified. "_He_ isn't myself. He's the
just so totally other person. But I do want to see him," he added. "And
I can. And I shall."

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that
she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise expressed
it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy
derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his
stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breatheable
air. What she said however was unexpected. "Well, _I've_ seen him."

"You--?"

"I've seen him in a dream."

"Oh a 'dream'--!" It let him down.

"But twice over," she continued. "I saw him as I see you now."

"You've dreamed the same dream--?"

"Twice over," she repeated. "The very same."

This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. "You
dream about me at that rate?"

"Ah about _him_!" she smiled.

His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as she
said nothing more: "What's the wretch like?"

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that,
resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. "I'll tell you
some other time!"

CHAPTER II

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a
cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular
form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and
more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was
living for--since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had
retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to
cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and,
as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in
the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering
dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of wh