me to time, but he soon
ceased to be good-natured. He hates to be bored."

As he came just then, they had to find another subject. Mildred
observed him with more interest. She had learned to have respect for
Mrs. Brindley's judgments. But she soon gave over watching him. That
profound calm, those eyes concentrating all the life of the man like a
burning glass-- She had a disagreeable sense of being seen through,
even to her secretest thought, of being understood and measured and
weighed--and found wanting. It occurred to her for the first time that
part of the reason for her not liking him was the best of reasons--that
he did not like her.

The first time she was left alone with him, after this discovery, she
happened to be in an audacious and talkative mood, and his lack of
response finally goaded her into saying: "WHY don't you like me?" She
cared nothing about it; she simply wished to hear what he would say--if
he could be roused into saying anything. He was sitting on the steps
leading from the veranda to the sea--was smoking a cigarette and gazing
out over the waves like a graven image, as if he had always been posed
there and always would be there, the embodiment of repose gazing in
ineffable indifference upon the embodiment of its opposite. He made no
answer.

"I asked you why you do not like me," said she. "Did you hear?"

"Yes," replied he.

She waited; nothing further from him. Said she:

"Well, give me one of your cigarettes."

He rose, extended his case, then a light. He was never remiss in those
kinds of politeness. When she was smoking, he seated himself again and
dropped into the former attitude. She eyed him, wondering how it could
be possible that he had endured the incredible fatigues and hardships
Stanley Baird had related of him--hunting and exploring expeditions
into tropics and into frozen regions, mountain climbs, wild sea voyages
in small boats, all with no sign of being able to stand anything, yet
also with no sign of being any more disturbed than now in this seaside
laziness. Stanley had showed them a picture of him taken twenty years
and more ago when he was in college; he had looked almost the same
then--perhaps a little older.

"Well, I am waiting," persisted she.

She thought he was about to look at her--a thing he had never done, to
her knowledge, since they had known each other. She nerved herself to
receive the shock, with a certain flutter of expectancy, of ex