rything. I was not in that war at all; and as for the
expedition, I had a few adventures, of course, and most of those stories
are true, but it was not that way I got smashed. You have detected me in
one lie, so I may as well confess the lot, I suppose."

"Does it not seem to you rather a waste of energy to invent so many
falsehoods?" she asked. "I should have thought it was hardly worth the
trouble."

"What would you have? You know your own English proverb: 'Ask no
questions and you'll be told no lies.' It's no pleasure to me to fool
people that way, but I must answer them somehow when they ask what made
a cripple of me; and I may as well invent something pretty while I'm
about it. You saw how pleased Galli was."

"Do you prefer pleasing Galli to speaking the truth?"

"The truth!" He looked up with the torn fringe in his hand. "You
wouldn't have me tell those people the truth? I'd cut my tongue out
first!" Then with an awkward, shy abruptness:

"I have never told it to anybody yet; but I'll tell you if you care to
hear."

She silently laid down her knitting. To her there was something
grievously pathetic in this hard, secret, unlovable creature, suddenly
flinging his personal confidence at the feet of a woman whom he barely
knew and whom he apparently disliked.

A long silence followed, and she looked up. He was leaning his left arm
on the little table beside him, and shading his eyes with the mutilated
hand, and she noticed the nervous tension of the fingers and the
throbbing of the scar on the wrist. She came up to him and called him
softly by name. He started violently and raised his head.

"I f-forgot," he stammered apologetically. "I was g-going to t-tell you
about----"

"About the--accident or whatever it was that caused your lameness. But
if it worries you----"

"The accident? Oh, the smashing! Yes; only it wasn't an accident, it was
a poker."

She stared at him in blank amazement. He pushed back his hair with a
hand that shook perceptibly, and looked up at her, smiling.

"Won't you sit down? Bring your chair close, please. I'm so sorry I
can't get it for you. R-really, now I come to think of it, the case
would have been a p-perfect t-treasure-trove for Riccardo if he had
had me to treat; he has the true surgeon's love for broken bones, and
I believe everything in me that was breakable was broken on that
occasion--except my neck."

"And your courage," she put in softly. "But perhaps you count th