“I have thought of it often in the few days I have been here.  I have a home in New York, but I could not possibly afford to live in it; so I rent it; and when I want to go fishing there’s enough under hand to pay the expenses.  My poor old dad!  He was always indorsing notes for his friends, or carrying stock for them; and nothing ever came back.  I am afraid the disillusions broke his heart.  And then, perhaps I was a bitter disappointment.  I was expelled from college in my junior year.  I had no head for figures other than that kind which inhabit the Louvre and the Vatican.”

Her face became momentarily mirthful.

“So I couldn’t take hold of the firm for him,” he continued.  “And I suppose the last straw was when I tried my hand at reporting on one of the newspapers.  He knew that the gathering of riches, so far as I was concerned, was a closed door.  But I found my level; the business was and is the only one that ever interested me or fused my energy with real work.”

“But it is real work.  You are one of those men who have done something.  Most men these days rest on their fathers’ laurels.”

“It’s the line of the least resistance.  I never knew that the Jersey coast was so picturesque.  What a sweep!  Do you know, your house on that pine-grown crest reminds me of the Villa Serbelloni, only yonder is the sea instead of Como?”

“Como.”  Her eyes became dreamily half-shut.  Recollection put on its seven-league boots and annihilated the space between the wall under her elbows and the gardens of Serbelloni.  Fitzgerald half understood the thought.  “Isn’t Mr. Breitmann just a bit of a mystery to you?” she asked.  The seven-league boots had returned at a bound.

“In some ways, yes.”  He rather resented the abrupt angle; it was not in poetic touch with the time being.

“He is inclined to be too much reserved.  But last night Mr. Ferraud succeeded in tearing down some of it.  If I could put in a book what all you men have seen and taken part in!  Mr. Breitmann would be almost handsome but for those scars.”

He kicked the turf at the foot of the wall.  “In Germany they are considered beauty-spots.”

“I am not in sympathy with that custom.”

“Still, it requires courage of a kind.”

“The noblest wounds are those that are carried unseen.  Student scars are merely patches of vanity.”

“He has others besides those.  He was nearly killed in the Soudan.”  Fitzgerald was compelled to offer some defense for the absent.  That Breitmann had lied to him, that his appearance here had been in the regular order of things, did not take away the fact that the Bavarian was a man and a brave one.  Closely as he had watched, up to the present he had learned absolutely nothing; and to have shown Breitmann the telegram would have accomplished nothing further than to have put him wholly on guard.

“Have you no scars?” mischief in her eyes.