ulse
the ladies around us would at once solve the doubt they have
discussed in the drawing-room. All _table-d'hote_ ladies
speculate concerning their fellow-guests in the hotel. . . . .
Thirty pairs of eyes were on the point of detecting you for a
fashionable physician, and by this time to-morrow thirty ladies
travelling in search of health would have found means to make
your acquaintance and pump you for medical advice on the
cheap. . . . Yes, Farrell, you have a lively instinct of
self-preservation. I will note it. . . . Now tell me.--When I
walked in just now, that same instinct prompted you to get up
and run; to run as you did along the foreshore this afternoon.
What restrained you?'

"'Why, hang it all,' he blurted with a look around; 'a fellow
couldn't very well show up like that before all these ladies!'

"He meant it too, Roddy. It came out with a flush, plump and
honest.

"It makes the chase more interesting. But I am annoyed with
myself over the miscalculation. . . . I could have sworn he was
a coward in grain. I marked all the _stigmata_. . . .
And behold he can show fight!--at any rate in presence of the
other sex. . . . Can something have happened to him, think you,
since our talk at Versailles? Is it possible that I am
_educating_ the man?

"On top of this complicating discovery I made a simplifying one.

"You know that I have a knack with animals, in the way of
handling their passions. I've never tried it on humans: for
I've never laid down any basis of knowledge, and I've always
detested empiricism. That study, as you remember, was to come.

"Well, I'll write further about it some day. . . . But I believe
I have _something like_ this power over Farrell. . . . I put out
a feeler or two--to change metaphors, I waved a hand gently over
the lyre, scarcely touching the strings; and it certainly
struck me that they responded. You will understand that a
_table-d'hote_ was no place for pushing the experiment.
And there were one or two men in the smoking-room when we sought
it.

"Farrell found himself; talked, after a while, quite well and
easily. In the smoking-room he told me a good deal about his
early life: all _bourgeois_ stuff, of course, but recounted in
the manner that belongs to it, and quite wo