high opinion of me. But what affected me most was the indifference of
the Fyne dog. He used to precipitate himself at full speed and with a
frightful final upward spring upon my waistcoat, at least once at each of
our meetings. He had neglected that ceremony this time notwithstanding
my correct and even conventional conduct in offering him a cake; it
seemed to me symbolic of my final separation from the Fyne household. And
I remembered against him how on a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora
de Barral--who was morbidly sensitive.

I sat down in the porch and, maybe inspired by secret antagonism to the
Fynes, I said to myself deliberately that Captain Anthony must be a fine
fellow. Yet on the facts as I knew them he might have been a dangerous
trifler or a downright scoundrel. He had made a miserable, hopeless girl
follow him clandestinely to London. It is true that the girl had written
since, only Mrs. Fyne had been remarkably vague as to the contents. They
were unsatisfactory. They did not positively announce imminent nuptials
as far as I could make it out from her rather mysterious hints. But then
her inexperience might have led her astray. There was no fathoming the
innocence of a woman like Mrs. Fyne who, venturing as far as possible in
theory, would know nothing of the real aspect of things. It would have
been comic if she were making all this fuss for nothing. But I rejected
this suspicion for the honour of human nature.

I imagined to myself Captain Anthony as simple and romantic. It was much
more pleasant. Genius is not hereditary but temperament may be. And he
was the son of a poet with an admirable gift of individualising, of
etherealizing the common-place; of making touching, delicate, fascinating
the most hopeless conventions of the, so-called, refined existence.

What I could not understand was Mrs. Fyne's dog-in-the-manger attitude.
Sentimentally she needed that brother of hers so little! What could it
matter to her one way or another--setting aside common humanity which
would suggest at least a neutral attitude. Unless indeed it was the
blind working of the law that in our world of chances the luckless _must_
be put in the wrong somehow.

And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards
injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a
shape of duplicity. It might have been unconscious on Mrs. Fyne's part,
but her leading idea appeared to me