My dear boy, it's so amusing, so interesting, that it will surely be
quite impossible for me to forego such hours as these."

This made Morgan stop once more. "You _do_ keep something back. Oh
you're not straight--_I_ am!"

"How am I not straight?"

"Oh you've got your idea!"

"My idea?"

"Why that I probably shan't make old--make older--bones, and that you can
stick it out till I'm removed."

"You _are_ too clever to live!" Pemberton repeated.

"I call it a mean idea," Morgan pursued. "But I shall punish you by the
way I hang on."

"Look out or I'll poison you!" Pemberton laughed.

"I'm stronger and better every year. Haven't you noticed that there
hasn't been a doctor near me since you came?"

"_I'm_ your doctor," said the young man, taking his arm and drawing him
tenderly on again.

Morgan proceeded and after a few steps gave a sigh of mingled weariness
and relief. "Ah now that we look at the facts it's all right!"

CHAPTER VII

They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the first
consequences of their doing so was that Pemberton stuck it out, in his
friend's parlance, for the purpose. Morgan made the facts so vivid and
so droll, and at the same time so bald and so ugly, that there was
fascination in talking them over with him, just as there would have been
heartlessness in leaving him alone with them. Now that the pair had such
perceptions in common it was useless for them to pretend they didn't
judge such people; but the very judgement and the exchange of perceptions
created another tie. Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he
himself was made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences. What
came out in it most was the small fine passion of his pride. He had
plenty of that, Pemberton felt--so much that one might perhaps wisely
wish for it some early bruises. He would have liked his people to have a
spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually eating humble-
pie. His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume
even more than his mother. He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled out
of an "affair" at Nice: there had once been a flurry at home, a regular
panic, after which they all went to bed and took medicine, not to be
accounted for on any other supposition. Morgan had a romantic
imagination, led by poetry and history, and he would have liked those who
"bore his name"--as he used to say to Pemberton with the humour tha