this evidently emphatic battle.  I had hoped to glean some more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had disembarrassed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion.  She held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished a second help of the pudding.  After thirty-five years of boarders and butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature, lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of the law.

An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders would have been glad to ask me questions, too.

It was the male honeymooner who addressed me.  “Did I understand you to say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?”

“Daphne!” called out Mrs. Trevise, “Mr. Henderson will take an orange.”

And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or noses, or anything of the sort.  It was just as well, I reflected, when I reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.

This reflection increased my esteem for the boy’s admirable reticence.  What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him?  It was other people, invariably, who told me of his troubles.  There had been that single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.

Should I “like to take orders from a negro?” Put personally, it came to me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn’t have to think before reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what you please—­convention, prejudice, instinct—­something answered most prompt and emphatically in the negative.  I revolved in my mind as I tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to “antique” shops.  They wouldn’t go in, the objects; they were of defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials—­glass and brass—­and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole lot decently