“That’s great!” Brown’s face showed his pleasure.

XI

BROWN’S PRESENT WORLD

When Miss Forrest returned from her survey of the kitchen she had come straight to the corner of the hearth where Brown stood, and had taken the chair beside the one he had lately occupied.  He was therefore beside her when he sat down to drink his coffee with his guests.  At a moment when Webb Atchison and Sue Breckenridge were engaged in a bit of controversy over the relative merits of varying methods of coffee making, Helena Forrest turned to Brown, who had been looking into the fire without speaking.

“I hope you don’t really mind our coming up here to-night,” she said.

“Mind it?  If I did, I couldn’t blame you, for you came against your will,” he answered—­and his eyes were no longer upon the fire.

“Without my consent, but not, perhaps, against my will.”

He regarded her intently.  She met his look without turning aside.

“You felt a curiosity to see the hermit in his cell,” was his explanation of the matter.

She nodded.  “Of course.  Who wouldn’t, after such reports as Mrs. Breckenridge brought back?”

“And now that you have seen him—­you are consumed with pity?”

“No.  If I am consumed with anything it is with envy.”

His low laugh spoke his disbelief.  She read it in the sound and in the way his gaze left her face and went back to the fire.

“You don’t think I mean that,” said she.

“Hardly.”

“Why not?”

“It is—­inconceivable.”

“Why?”

Her face, turned toward him, invited him to look at it again, but he did not—­just then.

“Because you are—­Helena Forrest,” he answered.

“And what is she, please, in your opinion?”

“An inhabitant of another world than that I live in.”

“A world of which you have an even poorer opinion than you used to have when you lived in it yourself!”

He smiled.  “Anyhow, I am no longer in it.  Nor ever shall go back.”

A startled look passed over her face.  “You don’t mean that you intend to stay here—­forever?”

“Not quite that.  But I mean to do this sort of work, rather than the sort I began with.  To do it I must live much as I am living now, where ever that may be.  Now—­what about the envy of me you profess?”

He turned, still smiling, at the little sound he caught from her half-closed lips.

“Are you happy in such a decision?” she murmured.

“Do I look like an unhappy man?”

She shook her head.  “That’s what I have been noticing about you ever since I came.  You did look unhappy when you went away.  Now, you don’t.  And it is the look on your face which gives me the sense of envy.”

Brown gave one quick glance at the rest of the party.  “Do you mean to say,” he questioned, very low, “that you are not happy?”