g--we had
not discussed her since. I had not been Yeldham's friend, his disciple,
a mental sitter at his feet, without learning to walk warily where the
fuse of his passions flickered. For some time there was a tacit
agreement to ignore the impending danger, to talk of trivialities,
wheeling round the central idea without ever settling there. But one
morning when he had called at the little farm cottage where she lived
and had found her flown without a word or a regret, his despair had been
too much for him. The whole story rolled from his lips: his love for
her, her seeming reciprocity, their wanderings in the woods, her
reliant, trusting attitude--which had taught him to wish himself some
knight of the Round Table and not a mere besmirched man of many
passions--her flutterings of childish gaiety and sombre philosophy that
had tinted her speech garishly as rainbows on thunder-clouds: he gave
forth all, and asked, with an expression jejune as Sahara, what the
sudden flight could mean.

I was so out of it, as the phrase is, that I could volunteer small
elucidation: that she was a coquette of the first order seemed the most
feasible solution, and I offered it. He derided the notion--it was
apparently so frivolous a venture that it failed to anger him--he never
set hands on the cudgels for defence. "She is not shallow," he had
merely said, and his poor brain had tackled the enigma so often and to
so little purpose that its purport had become an unmeaning and vacuous
reiteration. But one day, after we had returned to town and were working
well in harness, he with his book, I with my illustrations for it, he
burst out afresh.

"She unintentionally let out where she lived: it is a little village on
the coast of France. She must have returned."

"Well?" I said, suspending my work and pretending to extract a hair from
the fine point of my drawing-pen.

"Well," he burst out, "the world is our oyster, and if we shirk opening
it we can't hope to filch pearls!"

"That means?" I hinged expectantly.

"That means, in plain words, that I don't intend to give up the biggest
pearl that God ever sent to make a man rich."

"You intend to follow her?" I questioned--needlessly, indeed, for his
kindling eye contained a fire of decision and energy that for fourteen
days, since the sorry one of her disappearance, had smouldered.

"Yes, follow her, make her love me by every art, divine or devilish--I
don't care which, so long as she lo