ts bulging forehead. There was a wooden seat set well back under
this cover. Two persons who found themselves alone there might count on
security from interruption.

Mrs. Tailleur and Lucy were alone.

Lucy looked at the Cliff wall in front of them.

"We must go back," said he.

"Oh no," said she; "don't let's go back."

"But if you want to walk----"

"I don't," said she; "do you?"

He didn't, and they seated themselves. In the charm of this intimate
seclusion Lucy became more than ever dumb. Mrs. Tailleur waited a few
minutes in apparent meditation.

All Lucy said was "May I smoke?"

"You may." She meditated again.

"I was wondering," said she, "whether you were ever going to say
anything."

"I didn't know," said Lucy simply, "whether I might. I thought you were
thinking."

"So I was. I was thinking of what you were going to say next. I never
met anybody who said less and took so long a time to say it in."

"Well," said Lucy, "I was thinking too."

"I know you were. You needn't be so afraid of me unless you like."

"I am not," said he stiffly, "in the least afraid of you. I'm
desperately afraid of saying the wrong thing."

"To me? Or everybody?"

"Not everybody."

"To me, then. Do you think I might be difficult?"

"Difficult?"

"To get on with?"

"Not in the least. Possibly, if I may say so, a little difficult to
know."

She smiled. "I don't usually strike people in that light."

"Well, I think I'm afraid of boring you."

"You couldn't if you tried from now to midnight."

"How do you know what I mightn't do?"

"That's it. I don't know. I never _should_ know. It's only the people
I'm sure of that bore me. Don't they you?"

He laughed uneasily.

"The people," she went on, "who are sure of _me_; who think I'm so easy
to know. They don't know me, and they don't know that I know them. And
they're the only people I've ever, ever met. I can tell what they're
going to say before they've said it. It's always the same thing.
It's--if you like--the inevitable thing. If you can't have anything but
the same thing, at least you like it put a little differently. You'd
think, among them all, they might find it easy to put it a little
differently sometimes; but they never do; and it's the brutal monotony
of it that I cannot stand."

"I suppose," said Lucy, "people _are_ monotonous."

"They don't know," said she, evidently ignoring his statement as
inadequate, "they don't know how sick I am of i