Between Behemoth and young Henry Surface there passed a long look.  The young man walked slowly across the room to where the creature lay, and, bending down, patted him on the head.  He did it with indescribable awkwardness.  Certainly Behemoth must have perceived what was so plain even to a human critic, that here was the first dog this man had ever patted in his life.  Yet, being a pleasure-dog, he was wholly civil about it.  In fact, after a lidless scrutiny unembarrassed by any recollections of his last meeting with this young man, he declared for friendship.  Gravely he lifted a behemothian paw, and gravely the young man shook it.

To Behemoth young Mr. Surface addressed the following remarks:—­

“West was simply deceived—­hoodwinked by men infinitely cleverer than he at that sort of thing.  It was a manly thing—­his coming to you now and telling you; much harder than never to—­have made the mistake in the beginning.  Of course—­it wipes the slate clean.  It makes everything all right now.  You appreciate that.”

Behemoth yawned.

The young man turned, and came a step or two forward, both face and voice under complete control again.

“I received a note from you this morning,” he began briskly, “asking me to come in—­”

The girl’s voice interrupted him.  Standing beside the little typewriter-table, exactly where her caller had surprised her, she had watched with a mortifying dumbness the second meeting between the pleasure-dog and the little Doctor that was.  But now pride sprang to her aid, stinging her into speech.  For it was an unendurable thing that she should thus tamely surrender to him the mastery of her situation, and suffer her own fault to be glossed over so ingloriously.

“Won’t you let me tell you,” she began hurriedly, “how sorry I am—­how ashamed—­that I misjudged—­”

“No!  No!  I beg you to stop.  There is not the smallest occasion for anything of that sort—­”

“Don’t you see my dreadful position?  I suspect you, misjudge you—­wrong you at every step—­and all the time you are doing a thing so fine—­so generous and splendid—­that I am humiliated—­to—­”

Once again she saw that painful transformation in his face:  a difficult dull-red flood sweeping over it, only to recede instantly, leaving him white from neck to brow.

“What is the use of talking in this way?” he asked peremptorily.  “What is the good of it, I say?  The matter is over and done with.  Everything is all right—­his telling you wipes it all from the slate, just as I said.  Don’t you see that?  Well, can’t you dismiss the whole incident from your mind and forget that it ever happened?”

“I will try—­if that is what you wish.”

She turned away, utterly disappointed and disconcerted by his summary disposal of the burning topic over which she had planned such a long and satisfying discussion.  He started to say something, checked himself, and said something entirely different.