"Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?"
Pemberton replied. Yet he didn't want to come at all; he was coming
because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at
the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant
patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He had had his full
wave but couldn't pay the score at his inn. Moreover he had caught in
the boy's eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.

"Well, I'll do the best I can for you," said Morgan; with which he turned
away again. He passed out of one of the long windows; Pemberton saw him
go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He remained there while the
young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton's looking as if he
expected a farewell from him, interposed with: "Leave him, leave him;
he's so strange!" Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say.
"He's a genius--you'll love him," she added. "He's much the most
interesting person in the family." And before he could invent some
civility to oppose to this she wound up with: "But we're all good, you
know!"

"He's a genius--you'll love him!" were words that recurred to our
aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses
were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there
was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken
too much for granted it would only disgust him. As he left the villa
after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning
over it. "We shall have great larks!" he called up.

Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: "By the time you come
back I shall have thought of something witty!"

This made Pemberton say to himself "After all he's rather nice."

CHAPTER II

On the Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her
husband had come back and the girls and the other son were at home. Mr.
Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his buttonhole,
the ribbon of a foreign order--bestowed, as Pemberton eventually learned,
for services. For what services he never clearly ascertained: this was a
point--one of a large number--that Mr. Moreen's manner never confided.
What it emphatically did confide was that he was even more a man of the
world than you might first make out. Ulick, the firstborn, was in
visible training for the same profession--under the disadvantage as yet,
however, of