nothing but good. Only that wouldn't have prevented him, if Lance
_had_ taken his advice, from being in effect horribly cruel.'

They had a sociable way of talking of him to his face as if he had
been in the clay or--at most--in the plaster, and the Master was
unfailingly generous. He might have been waving Egidio to make him
revolve. 'Ah but poor Peter wasn't so wrong as to what it may after
all come to that he _will_ learn.'

'Oh but nothing artistically bad,' she urged--still, for poor Peter,
arch and dewy.

'Why just the little French tricks,' said the Master: on which their
friend had to pretend to admit, when pressed by Mrs Mallow, that these
aesthetic vices had been the objects of his dread.

III

'I know now,' Lance said to him the next year, 'why you were so much
against it.' He had come back supposedly for a mere interval and was
looking about him at Carrara Lodge, where indeed he had already on two
or three occasions since his expatriation briefly reappeared. This had
the air of a longer holiday. 'Something rather awful has happened to
me. It _isn't_ so very good to know.'

'I'm bound to say high spirits don't show in your face,' Peter was
rather ruefully forced to confess. 'Still, are you very sure you do
know?'

'Well, I at least know about as much as I can bear.' These remarks
were exchanged in Peter's den, and the young man, smoking cigarettes,
stood before the fire with his back against the mantel. Something of
his bloom seemed really to have left him.

Poor Peter wondered. 'You're clear then as to what in particular I
wanted you not to go for?'

'In particular?' Lance thought. 'It seems to me that in particular
there can have been only one thing.'

They stood for a little sounding each other. 'Are you quite sure?'

'Quite sure I'm a beastly duffer? Quite--by this time.'

'Oh!'--and Peter turned away as if almost with relief.

'It's _that_ that isn't pleasant to find out.'

'Oh I don't care for "that",' said Peter, presently coming round
again. 'I mean I personally don't.'

'Yet I hope you can understand a little that I myself should!'

'Well, what do you mean by it?' Peter sceptically asked.

And on this Lance had to explain--how the upshot of his studies in
Paris had inexorably proved a mere deep doubt of his means. These
studies had so waked him up that a new light was in his eyes; but what
the new light did was really to show him too much. 'Do you know what's
the matter wit