ut the divergences between them were great; the possibilities of
friction many. Falloden was astonished to find that he disliked Otto's
little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done in
college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his
tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on
his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And
he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to
Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague
sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that _panache_ means to the
Frenchman, or "glory" to the Slav.

"Then why, in the name of common sense, are we living together?"

He could really give no answer but the answer of "necessity"--of a
spiritual need--issuing from a strange tangle of circumstance. The
helpless form, the upturned face of his dying father, seemed to make the
centre of it, and those faint last words, so sharply, and, as it were,
dynamically connected with the hateful memory of Otto's fall and cry in
the Marmion Quad, and the hateful ever-present fact of his maimed life.
Constance too--his scene with her on the river bank--her letter,
breaking with him--and then the soft, mysterious change in her--and that
passionate, involuntary promise in her eyes and voice, as they stood
together in her aunts' garden--all these various elements, bitter and
sweet, were mingled in the influence which was shaping his own life. He
wanted to forgive himself; and he wanted Constance to forgive him,
whether she married him or no. A kind of sublimated egotism, he said to
himself, after all!

But Otto? What had really made him consent to take up daily life with
the man to whom he owed his disaster? Falloden seemed occasionally to be
on the track of an explanation, which would then vanish and evade him.
He was conscious, however, that here also, Constance Bledlow was somehow
concerned; and, perhaps, the Pole's mystical religion. He asked himself,
indeed, as Constance had already done, whether some presentiment of
doom, together with the Christian doctrines of forgiveness and vicarious
suffering, were not at the root of it? There had been certain symptoms
apparent during Otto's last weeks at Penfold known only to the old
vicar, to himself and Sorell. The doctors were not convinced yet of the
presence of phthisis; but from various signs, Falloden was inclined to
think that the boy believ