onderful things--he's so
interesting."

There was a certain shock for Paul Overt in the knowledge that the fine
genius they were talking of had been reduced to so explicit a confession
and had made it, in his misery, to the first comer; for though Miss
Fancourt was charming what was she after all but an immature girl
encountered at a country-house? Yet precisely this was part of the
sentiment he himself had just expressed: he would make way completely for
the poor peccable great man not because he didn't read him clear, but
altogether because he did. His consideration was half composed of
tenderness for superficialities which he was sure their perpetrator
judged privately, judged more ferociously than any one, and which
represented some tragic intellectual secret. He would have his reasons
for his psychology a fleur de peau, and these reasons could only be cruel
ones, such as would make him dearer to those who already were fond of
him. "You excite my envy. I have my reserves, I discriminate--but I
love him," Paul said in a moment. "And seeing him for the first time
this way is a great event for me."

"How momentous--how magnificent!" cried the girl. "How delicious to
bring you together!"

"Your doing it--that makes it perfect," our friend returned.

"He's as eager as you," she went on. "But it's so odd you shouldn't have
met."

"It's not really so odd as it strikes you. I've been out of England so
much--made repeated absences all these last years."

She took this in with interest. "And yet you write of it as well as if
you were always here."

"It's just the being away perhaps. At any rate the best bits, I suspect,
are those that were done in dreary places abroad."

"And why were they dreary?"

"Because they were health-resorts--where my poor mother was dying."

"Your poor mother?"--she was all sweet wonder.

"We went from place to place to help her to get better. But she never
did. To the deadly Riviera (I hate it!) to the high Alps, to Algiers,
and far away--a hideous journey--to Colorado."

"And she isn't better?" Miss Fancourt went on.

"She died a year ago."

"Really?--like mine! Only that's years since. Some day you must tell me
about your mother," she added.

He could at first, on this, only gaze at her. "What right things you
say! If you say them to St. George I don't wonder he's in bondage."

It pulled her up for a moment. "I don't know what you mean. He doesn't
make speec