wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost
with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to
a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He
put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up
muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. 'You don't
feel worse, I hope?' He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And
for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.

'No,' he said almost gaily; 'I feel enormously better.' But Herbert's
long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still
fixed on his face. 'I am afraid, my dear fellow,' he said, with
something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, 'the
struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.'

'The question is,' answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical
melancholy in his voice, 'though I am not sure that the answer very much
matters--what's going to put me together again? It's the old story of
Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a
quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?'

'What was that?' said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.

'Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still
my own old stodgy self, that you thought the face--the face, you know,
might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather
haunt me. In that case--well, what then?' Lawford had himself listened
to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of
a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the
difficulty involved in the doing of it.

'"Work in,"' repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with
a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't
bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are
only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot's over the
threshold, it's nine points of the law! But I don't remember saying it.'
He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: 'I say such an awful lot of
things. And I'm always changing my mind. It's a standing joke against me
with my sister. She says the recording angel will have two sides to my
account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
Saturdays--diametrically opposite convictions, and both kinds wrong. On
Sundays I am all things to all men. As for Sabathier, by the way, I