were really
very beautiful eyes notwithstanding the dark rims encircling them.

"If only I had met you before!" she murmured.

"Why?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Don't ask me," she begged. "It would not be good for your conceit, if
you have any, to tell you."

"I have no conceit and I am not inquisitive," he said, "but I do not see
why you laughed."

Their period of waiting came to an end at this point. The fish was
brought and their conversation became disjointed. In the silence which
followed, the old shadow crept over her face. Once only it lifted. It
was while they were waiting for the cutlets. She leaned towards him, her
elbows upon the tablecloth, her face supported by her fingers.

"I think that it is time we left these generalities," she insisted, "and
you told me something rather more personal, something which I am very
anxious to know. Tell me exactly why so self-centered a person as
yourself should interest himself in a fellow-creature at all. It seems
odd to me."

"It is odd," he admitted, frankly. "I will try to explain it to you but
it will sound very bald, and I do not think that you will understand. I
watched you a few nights ago out on the roof at Blenheim House. You were
looking across the house-tops and you didn't seem to be seeing anything
at all really, and yet all the time I knew that you were seeing things I
couldn't, you were understanding and appreciating something which I knew
nothing of, and it worried me. I tried to talk to you that evening, but
you were rude."

"You really are a curious person," she remarked. "Are you always
worried, then, if you find that some one else is seeing things or
understanding things which are outside your comprehension?"

"Always," he replied promptly.

"You are too far-reaching," she affirmed. "You want to gather everything
into your life. You cannot. You will only be unhappy if you try. No man
can do it. You must learn your limitations or suffer all your days."

"Limitations!" He repeated the words with measureless scorn. "If I learn
them at all," he declared, with unexpected force, "it will be with scars
and bruises, for nothing else will content me."

"We are, I should say, almost the same age," she remarked slowly.

"I am twenty-five," he told her.

"I am twenty-two," she said. "It seems strange that two people whose
ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have come together
like this even for a moment. I do not understand i