e of it;
but in effect he had never yet had a friend, because he had never yet
taken his shutters down, so to speak, or thrown his front door open. He
had peeped out through chinks, and felt how lonely he was, but he had
not given anyone a chance to get in.

Falbe, on the other hand, lived at his window, ready to hail the
passer-by, even as he had hailed Michael, with cheerful words. There
he lounged in his shirt-sleeves, you might say, with elbows on the
window-sill; and not from politeness, but from good fellowship, from the
fact that he liked people, was at home to everybody. He liked people;
there was the key to it. And Michael, however much he might be capable
of liking people, had up till now given them no sign of it. It really
was not their fault if they had not guessed it.

Two days passed, on the first of which Parsifal was given, and on the
second Meistersinger. On the third there was no performance, and the two
young men had agreed to meet in the morning and drive out of the town to
a neighbouring village among the hills, and spend the day there in
the woods. Michael had looked forward to this day with extraordinary
pleasure, but there was mingled with it a sort of agony of apprehension
that Falbe would find him a very boring companion. But the precepts of
Aunt Barbara came to his mind, and he reflected that the certain and
sure way of proving a bore was to be taken up with the idea that he
might be. And anyhow, Falbe had proposed the plan himself.

They lunched in a little restaurant near a forest-enclosed lake, and
since the day was very hot, did no more than stroll up the hill for a
hundred yards, where they would get some hint of breeze, and disposed
themselves at length on the carpet of pine-needles. Through the thick
boughs overhead the sunlight reached them only in specks and flakes, the
wind was but as a distant sea in the branches, and Falbe rolled over
on to his face, and sniffed at the aromatic leaves with the gusto with
which he enjoyed all that was to him enjoyable.

"Ah; that's good, that's good!" he said. "How I love smells--clean,
sharp smells like this. But they've got to be wild; you can't tame a
smell and put it on your handkerchief; it takes the life out of it. Do
you like smells, Comber?"

"I--I really never thought about it," said Michael.

"Think now, then, and tell me," said Falbe. "If you consider, you know
such a lot about me, and, as a matter of fact, I know nothing whatever