translating it. But I'm frightfully rusty; it's old French; would you
mind having a look?'

Mr Bethany blinked and listened. He tried for the twentieth time to
judge his friend's eyes, to gain as best he could some sustained and
unobserved glance at this baffling face. 'Where is your precious French
book?' he said irritably.

'It's upstairs.'

'Fire away, then!' Lawford rose and glanced about the room. 'What, no
light there either?' snapped Mr Bethany. 'Take this; I don't mind the
dark. There'll be plenty of that for me soon.'

Lawford hesitated at the door, looking rather strangely back. 'No,'
he said, 'there are matches upstairs.' He shut the door after him. The
darkness seemed cold and still as water. He went slowly up, with eyes
fixed wide on the floating luminous gloom, and out of memory seemed to
gather, as faintly as in the darkness which they had exorcised for him,
the strange pitiful eyes of the night before. And as he mounted a chill,
terrible, physical peace seemed to steal over him.

Mr Bethany was sitting as he had left him, looking steadily on the
floor, when Lawford returned. He flattened out the book on the table
with a sniff of impatience. And dragging the candle nearer, and stooping
his nose close to the fusty print, he began to read.

'Was this in the house?' he inquired presently.

'No,' said Lawford; 'it was lent to me by a friend--Herbert.'

'H'm! don't know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is.
This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of clap-trap
eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off,
apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau,
with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that
prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix
on this for your holiday reading?'

'Sabathier's alive, isn't he?'

'I never said he wasn't. He's a good deal too much alive for my old
wits, with his Mam'selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough,
perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.'

'Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?' Mr Bethany
peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. 'I should say
decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare
you don't mean good. It's one of the dullest stupidities of the present
day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he's different
from the rest of us. O