bottomless ambiguity."

She became at this, on the spot, all intensity. "Ah do describe that
more--it's so interesting. There are no such suggestive questions. I'm
so fond of them. He thinks he's a failure--fancy!" she beautifully
wailed.

"That depends on what his ideal may have been. With his gifts it ought
to have been high. But till one knows what he really proposed to
himself--? Do _you_ know by chance?" the young man broke off.

"Oh he doesn't talk to me about himself. I can't make him. It's too
provoking."

Paul was on the point of asking what then he did talk about, but
discretion checked it and he said instead: "Do you think he's unhappy at
home?"

She seemed to wonder. "At home?"

"I mean in his relations with his wife. He has a mystifying little way
of alluding to her."

"Not to me," said Marian Fancourt with her clear eyes. "That wouldn't be
right, would it?" she asked gravely.

"Not particularly; so I'm glad he doesn't mention her to you. To praise
her might bore you, and he has no business to do anything else. Yet he
knows you better than me."

"Ah but he respects _you_!" the girl cried as with envy.

Her visitor stared a moment, then broke into a laugh. "Doesn't he
respect you?"

"Of course, but not in the same way. He respects what you've done--he
told me so, the other day."

Paul drank it in, but retained his faculties. "When you went to look at
types?"

"Yes--we found so many: he has such an observation of them! He talked a
great deal about your book. He says it's really important."

"Important! Ah the grand creature!"--and the author of the work in
question groaned for joy.

"He was wonderfully amusing, he was inexpressibly droll, while we walked
about. He sees everything; he has so many comparisons and images, and
they're always exactly right. C'est d'un trouve, as they say."

"Yes, with his gifts, such things as he ought to have done!" Paul sighed.

"And don't you think he _has_ done them?"

Ah it was just the point. "A part of them, and of course even that
part's immense. But he might have been one of the greatest. However,
let us not make this an hour of qualifications. Even as they stand," our
friend earnestly concluded, "his writings are a mine of gold."

To this proposition she ardently responded, and for half an hour the pair
talked over the Master's principal productions. She knew them well--she
knew them even better than her visitor, who w