After a turn or two and some casual talk the professor said suddenly:  “My late son was in your school—­do you know?  I can imagine that had he lived and you had ever met you would have understood each other.  He too was inclined to action.”

He sighed, then, shaking off the mournful thought and with a nod at the dusky part of the terrace where the dress of his daughter made a luminous stain:  “I really wish you would drop in that quarter a few sensible, discouraging words.”

Renouard disengaged himself from that most perfidious of men under the pretence of astonishment, and stepping back a pace —

“Surely you are making fun of me, Professor Moorsom,” he said with a low laugh, which was really a sound of rage.

“My dear young friend!  It’s no subject for jokes, to me. . .  You don’t seem to have any notion of your prestige,” he added, walking away towards the chairs.

“Humbug!” thought Renouard, standing still and looking after him.  “And yet!  And yet!  What if it were true?”

He advanced then towards Miss Moorsom.  Posed on the seat on which they had first spoken to each other, it was her turn to watch him coming on.  But many of the windows were not lighted that evening.  It was dark over there.  She appeared to him luminous in her clear dress, a figure without shape, a face without features, awaiting his approach, till he got quite near to her, sat down, and they had exchanged a few insignificant words.  Gradually she came out like a magic painting of charm, fascination, and desire, glowing mysteriously on the dark background.  Something imperceptible in the lines of her attitude, in the modulations of her voice, seemed to soften that suggestion of calm unconscious pride which enveloped her always like a mantle.  He, sensitive like a bond slave to the moods of the master, was moved by the subtle relenting of her grace to an infinite tenderness.  He fought down the impulse to seize her by the hand, lead her down into the garden away under the big trees, and throw himself at her feet uttering words of love.  His emotion was so strong that he had to cough slightly, and not knowing what to talk to her about he began to tell her of his mother and sisters.  All the family were coming to London to live there, for some little time at least.

“I hope you will go and tell them something of me.  Something seen,” he said pressingly.

By this miserable subterfuge, like a man about to part with his life, he hoped to make her remember him a little longer.

“Certainly,” she said.  “I’ll be glad to call when I get back.  But that ‘when’ may be a long time.”

He heard a light sigh.  A cruel jealous curiosity made him ask —

“Are you growing weary, Miss Moorsom?”

A silence fell on his low spoken question.

“Do you mean heart-weary?” sounded Miss Moorsom’s voice.  “You don’t know me, I see.”