At Nice once, toward evening, as the pair rested in the open air after a walk, and looked over the sea at the pink western lights, he said suddenly to his comrade: “Do you like it, you know — being with us all in this intimate way?”

“My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn’t?”

“How do I know you’ll stay? I’m almost sure you won’t, very long.”

“I hope you don’t mean to dismiss me,” said Pemberton.

Morgan debated, looking at the sunset. “I think if I did right I ought to.”

“Well, I know I’m supposed to instruct you in virtue; but in that case don’t do right.”

“‘You’re very young — fortunately,” Morgan went on, turning to him again.

“Oh yes, compared with you!”

“Therefore it won’t matter so much if you do lose a lot of time.”

“That’s the way to look at it,” said Pemberton accommodatingly.

They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: “Do you like my father and my mother very much?”

“Dear me, yes. They’re charming people.”

Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly, familiarly, but at the same time affectionately, he remarked: “You’re a jolly old humbug!”

For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour. The boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which there was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation. It produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question — this was the first glimpse of it — destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his intercourse with his little companion. Later, when he found himself talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to Morg............