“In my secluded life,” he said, his eyelids reddening, “she is like a beautiful bird that flashes through the dull sky for a moment, but leaves the atmosphere brighter than before.”  He glanced round the room as if looking for her.  “I hope she is well?” he added, not attempting to conceal a certain accent of disappointment at her absence.

“Quite well when I heard from her,” answered Mr. Dundas, doing his best to speak without embarrassment.

Mr. Gryce turned his face in frank astonishment on the speaker.  “Ah!  She is from home, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Dundas curtly.

“I had not heard,” lisped the tenant of Lionnet.  “But I myself have been from home for a few days, and have just returned.  Though, indeed, present or absent, I know very little of my neighbors’ doings, as you may see.  I did not even know that Miss Dundas was from home.”

“Yet it was pretty widely talked about,” said Mr. Dundas, with a certain suspicious glance at the cherubic face smiling innocently into his.

“Doubtless the absence of Miss Dundas must have caused a gap,” replied Mr. Gryce, “but you see, as I said, I have been away myself, and when I am at home I do not gossip.”

“Have—­Where have you been?” asked Mr. Dundas abruptly, with that sudden glance as suddenly withdrawn which tells of a half-formed suspicion neither dwelt on nor clearly made out.

“To Paris,” said Mr. Gryce demurely.  “I went to see—­”

“Oh! you went to see Notre Dame and La Madeleine of course,” interrupted Sebastian satirically.

“No,” answered Mr. Gryce with a cherubic smile.  “Strange to say, I had business connected with that odd drama of Le Sphinx.”

There was not much more talk after this, and Mr. Gryce soon took his leave, desiring to be most respectfully remembered to Miss Dundas when her father next wrote, and to say that he was keeping some pretty specimens of moths for her on her return; both of which messages Sebastian promised to convey at the earliest opportunity, improvising a counter-remark of Leam’s which he was sorry he could not remember accurately, but it was something about butterflies and Mr. Gryce, though what it was he could not positively say.

“Never mind:  I will take the will for the deed,” said the naturalist as he smiled himself through the doorway.

And when he had gone Josephine declared that she did not care if he never came again:  there was something she did not like about him.  Pushed for a reason by her husband, who always assumed a logical and masculine tone to her, she had not one to produce, but she stumbled as if by chance on the word “sinister,” which was just what Mr. Gryce was not.  So Sebastian made her go into the library for the dictionary and hunt up the word through all its derivations, and thus proved to her incontestably that she was ignorant of the English language and of human nature in about equal proportions.