h me? I'm too horribly intelligent. Paris was really the
last place for me. I've learnt what I can't do.'

Poor Peter stared--it was a staggerer; but even after they had had, on
the subject, a longish talk in which the boy brought out to the full
the hard truth of his lesson, his friend betrayed less pleasure than
usually breaks into a face to the happy tune of 'I told you so!' Poor
Peter himself made now indeed so little a point of having told him so
that Lance broke ground in a different place a day or two after. 'What
was it then that--before I went--you were afraid I should find out?'
This, however, Peter refused to tell him--on the ground that if
he hadn't yet guessed perhaps he never would, and that in any case
nothing at all for either of them was to be gained by giving the thing
a name. Lance eyed him on this an instant with the bold curiosity of
youth--with the air indeed of having in his mind two or three names,
of which one or other would be right. Peter nevertheless, turning his
back again, offered no encouragement, and when they parted afresh it
was with some show of impatience on the side of the boy. Accordingly
on their next encounter Peter saw at a glance that he had now, in the
interval, divined and that, to sound his note, he was only waiting
till they should find themselves alone. This he had soon arranged
and he then broke straight out. 'Do you know your conundrum has been
keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came
over me--so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been
supposing I had to go to Paris to learn _that_? Even now, to see him
still so sublimely on his guard, Peter's young friend had to laugh
afresh. 'You won't give a sign till you're sure? Beautiful old Peter!'
But Lance at last produced it. 'Why, hang it, the truth about the
Master.'

It made between them for some minutes a lively passage, full of
wonder for each at the wonder of the other. 'Then how long have you
understood--'

'The true value of his work? I understood it,' Lance recalled, 'as
soon as I began to understand anything. But I didn't begin fully to do
that, I admit, till I got _la-bas_.'

'Dear, dear!'--Peter gasped with retrospective dread.

'But for what have you taken me? I'm a hopeless muff--that I _had_
to have rubbed in. But I'm not such a muff as the Master!' Lance
declared.

'Then why did you never tell me--?'

'That I hadn't, after all'--the boy took him up--'remained such