r to let her have it afresh that Chad's
case--whatever else of minor interest it might yield--was first and
foremost a miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the
entire man, and was so signal an instance that nothing else, for the
intelligent observer, could--COULD it?--signify. "It's a plot," he
declared--"there's more in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to
his fancy. "It's a plant!"

His fancy seemed to please her. "Whose then?"

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for
one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such elements
one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest human means.
It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one's energy
goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don't you
see?" he confessed with a queer face--"one wants to enjoy anything so
rare. Call it then life"--he puzzled it out--"call it poor dear old
life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the
surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossing--all, practically,
hang it, that one sees, that one CAN see."

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. "Is that what you've
written home?"

He tossed it off. "Oh dear, yes!"

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another walk.
"If you don't look out you'll have them straight over."

"Oh but I've said he'll go back."

"And WILL he?" Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long. "What's
that but just the question I've spent treasures of patience and
ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of him--after everything had led
up--every facility to answer? What is it but just the thing I came
here to-day to get out of you? Will he?"

"No--he won't," she said at last. "He's not free."

The air of it held him. "Then you've all the while known--?"

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she declared
with some impatience, "that you didn't see as much. It was enough to be
with him there--"

"In the box? Yes," he rather blankly urged.

"Well--to feel sure."

"Sure of what?"

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had
ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly pausing for
it, spoke with a shade of pity. "Guess!"

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for
a moment, as they waited together, their difference wa