over from the intensity of this moment.
She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would immediately be
required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an adventure, she decided
it would be wiser to wait. It was he who presently went on:

"Isn't it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
it. It's so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don't
know what's going to be in it, but you know it's certain to be rare
and desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father
and mother?"

She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of being
expected to answer.

"Oh, yes," she said, suddenly remembering. "I live here with my mother
and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent Farron."

"Didn't I tell you life played strange tricks?" he exclaimed. He sprang
up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. "I know all about him. I once
reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That's the same Farron, isn't
it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for its size in
this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your stepfather! He
must be a wonder."

"Yes, I think he is."

"You don't like him?"

"I like him very much. I don't _love_ him."

"The poor devil!"

"I don't believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
that's not quite just. He's kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no little
pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you feel
he's laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me this
morning at breakfast, 'Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?' That
made me feel as if I used the word 'marvelous' all the time, not a bit
as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last night."

"And did you?"

She gave him a rapid smile and went on:

"Now, my grandfather, my mother's father--his name is Lanley--(Mr. Lanley
evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that Wayne,
searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often scolds me
terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid, although I tell
him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but he never makes me feel
small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks afterward, something I've
said, word for word, the way I said it. It makes it sound so foolish. I'd
rather he said straight out that he thought I was a goose."