“It may not matter to you,” I said at length, “but it may to the lady.”

“I suppose it does matter more to them?”

The sunburnt face, puckered with a wry wistfulness, was only comic in its incongruous coat of grease.  But I was under no temptation to smile.  I had to confine my mind pretty closely to the general principle, and rather studiously to ignore the particular instance, before I could bring myself to answer the almost infantile inquiry in those honest eyes.

“My dear fellow, it must!”

Bob looked disappointed but resigned.

“Well, then, I won’t press it, though I’m not sure that I agree.  You see, it’s not as though there was or ever would be anything between us.  The idea’s absurd.  We are absolute pals and nothing else.  That’s what makes all this such a silly bore.  It’s so unnecessary.  Now she wants me to go alone, but I don’t see the fun of that.”

“Does she ask you to go alone?”

“She does.  That’s the worst of it.”

I nodded, and he asked me why.

“She probably thinks it would be the best answer to the tittle-tattlers, Bob.”

That was not a deliberate lie; not until the words were out did it occur to me that Mrs. Lascelles might now have another object in getting rid of her swain for the day.  But Bob’s eyes lighted in a way that made me feel a deliberate liar.

“By Jove!” he said, “I never thought of that.  I don’t agree with her, mind, but if that’s her game I’ll play it like a book.  So long, Duncan!  I’m not one of those chaps who ask a man’s advice without the slightest intention of ever taking it!”

“But I haven’t ventured to advise you,” I reminded the boy, with a cowardly eye to the remotest consequences.

“Perhaps not, but you’ve shown me what’s the proper thing to do.”  And he went away to do it there and then, like the blameless exception that I found him to so many human rules.

I had my breakfast upstairs after this, and lay for some considerable time a prey to feelings which I shall make no further effort to expound; for this interview had not altered, but only intensified them; and in any case they must be obvious to those who take the trouble to conceive themselves in my unenviable position.

And it was my ironic luck to be so circumstanced in a place where I could have enjoyed life to the hilt!  Only to lie with the window open was to breathe air of a keener purity, a finer temper, a more exhilarating freshness, than had ever before entered my lungs; and to get up and look out of the window was to peer into the limpid brilliance of a gigantic crystal, where the smallest object was in startling focus, and the very sunbeams cut with scissors.  The people below trailed shadows like running ink.  The light was ultra-tropical.  One looked for drill suits and pith headgear, and was amazed to find pajamas insufficient at the open window.

Upon the terrace on the other side, when I eventually came down, there were cane chairs and Tauchnitz novels under the umbrella tents, and the telescope out and trained upon a party on the Matterhorn.  A group of people were waiting turns at the telescope, my friend Quinby and the hanging judge among them.  But I searched under the umbrella tents as well as one could from the top of the steps before hobbling down to join the group.