“Of course you like him,” assented the older man, who had been watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of dry-flies.  “You’re too intelligent not to like everybody who’s not base—­and Arnold’s not base.  And he ‘likes’ you.  If you had cared to waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him by a single hair.  But then, everybody ‘likes’ you.”

“Old Mr. Sommerville doesn’t!” said Sylvia, on an impulse.

Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers together with exquisite precision.  “So you add second sight to your other accomplishments!  How in the world could a girl of your age have the experience and intuition to feel that?  Old Sommerville passes for a great admirer of yours.  You won’t, I hope, go so uncannily far in your omniscience as to pretend to know why he doesn’t like you?”

“No, I won’t,” said Sylvia, “because I haven’t the very faintest idea.  Have you?”

“I know exactly why.  It’s connected with one of the old gentleman’s eccentricities.  He’s afraid of you on account of his precious nephew.”

“I didn’t know he had a nephew.”  Sylvia was immensely astonished.

“Well, he has, and he bows down and worships him, as he does his granddaughter.  You see how he adores Molly.  It’s nice of the old fellow, the cult he has for his descendants, but occasionally inconvenient for innocent bystanders.  He thinks everybody wants to make off with his young folks.  You and I are fellow-suspects.  Haven’t you felt him wish he could strike me dead, when Molly makes tea for me, or turns over music as I play?” He laughed a little, a gentle, kind, indulgent laugh. “Molly!” he said, as if his point were more than elucidated by the mere mention of her name.

Sylvia intimated with a laugh that her point was clearer yet in that she had no name to mention.  “But I never saw his nephew.  I never even heard of him until this minute.”

“No, and very probably never will see him.  He’s very seldom here.  And if you did see him, you wouldn’t like him—­he’s an eccentric of the worst brand,” said Morrison tranquilly.  “But monomanias need no foundation in fact—­” He broke off abruptly to say:  “Is this all another proof of your diabolical cleverness?  I started in to hear something about yourself, and here I find myself talking about everything else in the world.”

“I’m not clever,” said Sylvia, hoping to be contradicted.

“Well, you’re a great deal too nice to be consciously so,” admitted Morrison.  “See here,” he went on, “it’s evident that you’re more than a match for me at this game.  Suppose we strike a bargain.  You introduce yourself to me and I’ll do the same by you.  Isn’t it quite the most fantastic of all the bizarreries of human intercourse that an ‘introduction’ to a fellow-being consists in being informed of his name,—­quite the most unimportant, fortuitous thing about him?”