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ulse the ladies around us would at once solve the doubt they have discussed in the drawing-room. All _table-d'hote_ ladies speculate concerning their fellow-guests in the hotel. . . . . Thirty pairs of eyes were on the point of detecting you for a fashionable physician, and by this time to-morrow thirty ladies travelling in search of health would have found means to make your acquaintance and pump you for medical advice on the cheap. . . . Yes, Farrell, you have a lively instinct of self-preservation. I will note it. . . . Now tell me.--When I walked in just now, that same instinct prompted you to get up and run; to run as you did along the foreshore this afternoon. What restrained you?' "'Why, hang it all,' he blurted with a look around; 'a fellow couldn't very well show up like that before all these ladies!' "He meant it too, Roddy. It came out with a flush, plump and honest. "It makes the chase more interesting. But I am annoyed with myself over the miscalculation. . . . I could have sworn he was a coward in grain. I marked all the _stigmata_. . . . And behold he can show fight!--at any rate in presence of the other sex. . . . Can something have happened to him, think you, since our talk at Versailles? Is it possible that I am _educating_ the man? "On top of this complicating discovery I made a simplifying one. "You know that I have a knack with animals, in the way of handling their passions. I've never tried it on humans: for I've never laid down any basis of knowledge, and I've always detested empiricism. That study, as you remember, was to come. "Well, I'll write further about it some day. . . . But I believe I have _something like_ this power over Farrell. . . . I put out a feeler or two--to change metaphors, I waved a hand gently over the lyre, scarcely touching the strings; and it certainly struck me that they responded. You will understand that a _table-d'hote_ was no place for pushing the experiment. And there were one or two men in the smoking-room when we sought it. "Farrell found himself; talked, after a while, quite well and easily. In the smoking-room he told me a good deal about his early life: all _bourgeois_ stuff, of course, but recounted in the manner that belongs to it, and quite wo
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