llow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has
provided excellently for the shyness of your soul."

When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her
breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew
so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:

"And that partner of yours is dead?"

"Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--"

"You never told me."

"Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It
seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that
Morrison is dead."

She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
expression of horror on her face.

"Morrison!" she whispered in an appalled tone. "Morrison!" Her head
drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice
that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables
of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head--could she
have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it
wildly improbable.

"This is very extraordinary!" he said. "Have you ever heard the name
before?"

Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she
could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting
her lower lip.

"Did you ever know anybody of that name?" he asked.

The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard
of that very man, she told Heyst.

"Impossible!" he said positively. "You are mistaken. You couldn't have
heard of him, it's--"

He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.

"But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess, that
it was your partner they were talking about."

"Talking about my partner?" repeated Heyst slowly.

"No." Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as
his. "No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know it."

"Who were they?" Heyst raised his voice. "Who was talking of me? Talking
where?"

With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a
level.

"Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?" she
said.

The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's simplified
conception of himself. For