er with poor Briss?"

"That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me. But if
nothing, in him, strikes you----!"

He met my eyes a moment--then glanced about. "Where is he?"

"Behind you; only don't turn round to look, for he knows----" But I
dropped, having caught something directed toward me in Brissenden's
face. My interlocutor remained blank, simply asking me, after an
instant, what it was he knew. On this I said what I meant. "He knows
we've noticed."

Long wondered again. "Ah, but I _haven't_!" He spoke with some
sharpness.

"He knows," I continued, noting the sharpness too, "what's the matter
with him."

"Then what the devil is it?"

I waited a little, having for the moment an idea on my hands. "Do you
see him often?"

Long disengaged the ash from his cigarette. "No. Why should I?"

Distinctly, he was uneasy--though as yet perhaps but vaguely--at what I
might be coming to. That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a
little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me. "Do you
mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?"

On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard. "'Strikes' me--in that boy?
Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life. He's not an
object of the smallest interest to me!"

I felt that if I insisted I should really stir up the old Long, the
stolid coxcomb, capable of rudeness, with whose redemption,
reabsorption, supersession--one scarcely knew what to call it--I had
been so happily impressed. "Oh, of course, if you haven't noticed, you
haven't, and the matter I was going to speak of will have no point. You
won't know what I mean." With which I paused long enough to let his
curiosity operate if his denial had been sincere. But it hadn't. His
curiosity never operated. He only exclaimed, more indulgently, that he
didn't know what I was talking about; and I recognised after a little
that if I had made him, without intention, uncomfortable, this was
exactly a proof of his being what Mrs. Briss, at the station, had called
cleverer, and what I had so much remarked while, in the garden before
dinner, he held our small company. Nobody, nothing could, in the time of
his inanity, have made him turn a hair. It was the mark of his
aggrandisement. But I spared him--so far as was consistent with my wish
for absolute certainty; changed the subject, spoke of other things, took
pains to sound disconnectedly, and only after reference to several of
the other