“You shall know,” he said, simply.  “Are you strong?”

“Strong to withstand anything at your hand.  There is nothing that you can give me, nothing that you can take away.”

“No,” he remarked, “nothing.  Yes, you have changed.  Still, when I look upon you, the ghosts of the past seem to rise like live things.”

“We both have changed.  We meet now upon equal grounds.  You are no longer the idol I made of you.”

“Don’t you think that to the idol this might be a relief, not a humiliation?  It is a terrible torture to sit in state with lips eternally shut.  Sometimes there comes over the most reticent of us a desire to break through the eternal loneliness that surrounds the soul.  It is this feeling that prompts madmen to tear off their clothes and exhibit their nakedness in the market-place.  It’s madness on my part, or a whim, or I don’t know what; but it pleases me that you should know the truth.”

“You promised me long ago that I should.”

“To-day I will redeem my promise, and I will tell you another thing that you will find hard to believe.”

“And that is?”

“That I loved you.”

Ethel smiled a little sceptically.  “You have loved often.”

“No,” he replied.  “Loved, seriously loved, I have, only once.”

XX

They were sitting in a little Italian restaurant where they had often, in the old days, lingered late into the night over a glass of Lacrimae Christi.  But no pale ghost of the past rose from the wine.  Only a wriggling something, with serpent eyes, that sent cold shivers down her spine and held her speechless and entranced.

When their order had been filled and the waiter had posted himself at a respectful distance, Reginald began—­at first leisurely, a man of the world.  But as he proceeded a strange exultation seemed to possess him and from his eyes leaped the flame of the mystic.

“You must pardon me,” he commenced, “if I monopolise the conversation, but the revelations I have to make are of such a nature that I may well claim your attention.  I will start with my earliest childhood.  You remember the picture of me that was taken when I was five?”

She remembered, indeed.  Each detail of his life was deeply engraven on her mind.

“At that time,” he continued, “I was not held to be particularly bright.  The reason was that my mind, being pre-eminently and extraordinarily receptive, needed a stimulus from without.  The moment I was sent to school, however, a curious metamorphosis took place in me.  I may say that I became at once the most brilliant boy in my class.  You know that to this day I have always been the most striking figure in any circle in which I have ever moved.”

Ethel nodded assent.  Silently watching the speaker, she saw a gleam of the truth from afar, but still very distant and very dim.