e strange fruit. He thought of that night upon
the hillside, the boy's passionate words, his almost wild desire to
realize, to turn into actual life, the fantasies which were then only
the creation of his fancy. How far had he realized them, he wondered?
What did this alteration in his exterior denote? From a few casual and
half-forgotten inquiries, Rochester knew that he was the son, or
rather the orphan of working-people in the neighboring town. There
was nothing in his blood to make him in any way the social equal
of these men and women amongst whom he now sat with such perfect
self-possession. Rochester found himself watching for some traces of
inferior breeding, some lapse of speech, some signs of an innate lack
of refinement. The absence of any of these things puzzled him. Saton
was assured, without being over-confident. He spoke of himself only
seldom. It was marvelous how often he seemed to avoid the use of the
first person. He seemed, too, modestly unconscious of the fact that
his conversation was in any way more interesting than the speech of
those by whom he was surrounded.

"You seem to have lived," his hostess said to him once, "in so many
countries, Mr. Saton. Are you really only as old as you look?"

"How can I answer that," he asked, smiling, "except by telling you
that I am twenty-five."

"You must have commenced to live in your perambulator," she declared.

"I have lived nowhere," he answered. "I have visited many places, and
travelled through many lands, but life with me has been a search."

"A search?" she murmured, dropping her voice a little, and intimating
by the slight movement of her head towards him, that their
conversation was to become a tete-a-tete. "Well," she continued, "I
suppose that life is that with all of us, only you see with us poor
frivolous people, a search means nearly always the same thing--a
search for amusement or distraction, whichever you choose to call it."

Saton shrugged his shoulders slightly.

"Different things amuse different people," he remarked. "My search, I
will admit, was of a different order."

"It is finished?" she asked.

"It will never be finished," he answered. "The man who finds what he
seeks," he added, raising his dark eyes to hers, "as a rule has fixed
his ambitions too low."

"Speaking of ambitions, Mr. Saton," Lord Penarvon asked across the
table, "are you interested in politics?"

"Not in the least," Saton answered frankly. "There seem to