“YOU’VE been away more than a week. What have you been doing up there in Scotland? They make a great mystery of it.”

So it was she began on that fateful evening of his return. She spoke in an intimate undertone. Miss Blame had dined and gone upstairs and Miss Pooley was out. The Dutchman was rapt in thought about the English Subjunctive Mood, and quite unheeding a talk that plainly was not addressed to him. “Eef you were,” he was whispering over and over again, “Eef you was. Yess.” She had waited for Edward Albert and now behind this barrier she had him to herself.

“Jerst business affairs,” he told her. “Fact is — quite unexpected — I been left an estate — in Scotland.”

“An estate!”

“Property anyhow. No idea I had any relations up there. Right out of the blue. There’s things have been kep’ from me. I been sort of made away with. I always felt it — kind of mystery. I been seeing lawyers and agents and all that,”

“And is it murch, Teddy? I hope it won’t take you away from here. I should miss you.”

“Well, I’ll be pretty well off. Naturally I ain’t made any plans. It’s all so sudden. I don’t want to go away from here — and ye. You all,” he corrected, feeling that after all others might be listening. “Leastways not till I got somewhere to go.”

She nodded. “What does it all come to?”

His discretion gave way to his desire to be impressive.

“Some fousands,” he said, “anyhow.”

“Independence.”

“All that,” he said.

“Lucky Teddy! You can go where you like; you can do what you please.”

“I’m going to look round me a bit first. You know I’m not even going to give up my — business job. Not for a bit. Just for something to do, I’ll keep it. I’d feel kind of lost. You see, you can’t be too careful. All this money; it’s come like a dream. Suppose I wake up tomorrow and find it was a dream.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can understand that at first. But you’ll find it real. You’ll find all the world before you.”

“I suppose if you was me you’d go right off to that gay Paree of yours?”

“I wonder. I might not, because you see then I could do it at any time, Teddy. I might want to stay here a bit. Just as you might. I might feel I was tearing myself away from something I cared for and wanted to go on seeing, We’re very much alike, Teddy, you and me, in a lot of things.”

“I never thought of that.”

“But we are, you know.”

“P’raps we are. Only you’re kind of cleverer. . . . She was so intent on their mutual business that she had completely forgotten her enthusiasm for French. She was just her preParisian self, and hardly a word of Entente Cordial escaped her.

When they went up stairs she put her arm through his, a thing she had never done before. “Come into the corner,”

she said, “I must talk some more to you about all this. Down there at table with all those people peeping and listening, one couldn’t let oneself go. But no I murst, I murst talk to you, Teddy, my dear. I’m so happy to see you so happy and I’m so afraid for you and the things that may happen to you. It will be wonderful for you to get away from all this. Do what you choose. Lead a life of your own. And so dangerous. I envy you, Teddy boy, I envy you. I could cry over you.”

Her intense sincerity evoked a reciprocal sincerity in him, Presently he was exposing himself to her as he rarely exposed himself even to himself. They sat close together so that the breath of their common desire mingled. She had dressed herself carefully and thinly, and he could feel her soft arm against his shoulder ............