ully,
the image seemed to sit there, at an immemorial window, like some long
effective and only at last exposed "decoy" of fate. It was _because_ he
was so beautifully good-looking, because he was so charming and clever
and frank--besides being one's third cousin, or whatever it was, one's
early schoolfellow and one's later college classmate--that one had
abjectly trusted him. To live thus with his unremoved, undestroyed,
engaging, treacherous face, had been, as our traveller desired, to live
with all of the felt pang; had been to consume it in such a single hot,
sore mouthful as would so far as possible dispose of it and leave but
cold dregs. Thus, if the Doctor, casting about for pleasantness, had
happened to notice him there, salient since he was, and possibly by the
same stroke even to know him, as New York--and more or less to its cost
now, mightn't one say?--so abundantly and agreeable had, the cup would
have overflowed and Monteith, for all he could be sure of the contrary,
would have relieved himself positively in tears.

"Oh _he's_ what's the matter with me--that, looking after some of my
poor dividends, as he for the ten years of my absence had served me by
doing, he has simply jockeyed me out of the whole little collection,
such as it was, and taken the opportunity of my return, inevitably at
last bewildered and uneasy, to 'sail,' ten days ago, for parts unknown
and as yet unguessable. It isn't the beastly values themselves, however;
that's only awkward and I can still live, though I don't quite know how
I shall turn round; it's the horror of _his_ having done it, and done it
to _me_--without a mitigation or, so to speak, a warning or an excuse."
That, at a hint or a jog, is what he would have brought out--only to
feel afterward, no doubt, that he had wasted his impulse and profaned
even a little his sincerity. The Doctor didn't in the event so much
as glance at his cluster of portraits--which fact quite put before our
friend the essentially more vivid range of imagery that a pair of eyes
transferred from room to room and from one queer case to another, in
such a place as that, would mainly be adjusted to. It wasn't for _him_
to relieve himself touchingly, strikingly or whatever, to such a
man: such a man might much more pertinently--save for professional
discretion--have emptied out there his own bag of wonders; prodigies
of observation, flowers of oddity, flowers of misery, flowers of the
monstrous, gathere