“He has been fearfully ill, poor fellow!” said Mr. Gryce, in the manner of an ejaculation.

She looked at the flowers with which the wood was golden and azure.  “Yes,” was her not too eloquent assent.

“And you have been sorry?”

“Every one has been sorry,” said Leam evasively.

“Yes, you have been sorry,” he repeated:  “I have read it in your face.”

He had done nothing of the kind:  he had guessed it from the fact of her daily visits, and he had surmised a special interest from that other group of facts which had first set him thinking—­namely, that Steel’s Corner owned a laboratory—­two, for the matter of that; that old Dr. Corfield was a clever toxicologist; that Leam had stayed there during her father’s honeymoon; and that her stepmother had died on the night of her arrival.  “And your average Englishman calls himself a creature with brains and inductive powers!” was his unspoken commentary on the finding of the coroner’s jury and the verdict of the coroner.  “Bull is a fool,” the old heathen used to think, hugging his own superior sagacity as a gift beyond those which Nature had allowed to Bull in the abstract.

“I have known him since I was a child.  Of course, I have been sorry,” said Leam coldly.

She disliked being questioned as much as being touched.  The two, indeed, were correlative.

“Early friendships are very dear,” said Mr. Gryce, watching her.  He was opening the vein of another idea which he had long wanted to work.

She was silent.

“Don’t you think so?” he asked.

“They may be,” was her reluctant answer.

“No, they are—­believe me, they are.  The happiest fate that man or woman can have is to marry the early friend—­transform the playmate of childhood into the lover of maturity, the companion of age.”

Leam made no reply.  She was afraid of this soft-voiced, large-eyed, benevolent old man who seemed able to read the hidden things of life at will.  It disturbed her that he should speak at this moment of the happiness lying in the fulfillment of youthful friendship by the way of mature love; and, proud and self-restrained as her bearing was, Mr. Gryce saw through the calmer surface into the disturbance beneath.

“Don’t you think so?” he asked for the second time.

“How should I know?” Leam answered, raising her eyes, but not looking into her companion’s face—­looking an inch or two above his head.  “I have seen too little to say which is best.”

“True, my child, I had forgotten that,” he said kindly.  “Will you take my word for it, then, in lieu of your own experience?”

“That depends,” said Leam.  “What is good for one is not good for all.”

“But safety is always good,” returned Mr. Gryce, meaning to fall back on the safety of love and happiness if he had made a bad shot by his aim at safety from the detection of crime.