“No, my dear chap,” he said.  “You may believe it to be unthinkable, and I may believe it to be inevitable; but what does it matter what either of us believes?  Che sara sara.  It was quite another thing that caused me to annoy myself.  It does not matter.”

Michael lay back on the soft slope.

“Yet I insist on knowing,” he said.  “That is, I mean, if it is not private.”

Falbe lay quietly with his long fingers in the sediment of pine-needles.

“Well, then, as it is not private, and as you insist,” he said, “I will certainly tell you.  Does it not strike you that you are behaving like an absolute stranger to me?  We have talked of me and my home and my plans all the time since we met at Victoria Station, and you have kept complete silence about yourself.  I know nothing of you, not who you are, or what you are, or what your flag is.  You fly no flag, you proclaim no identity.  You may be a crossing-sweeper, or a grocer, or a marquis for all I know.  Of course, that matters very little; but what does matter is that never for a moment have you shown me not what you happen to be, but what you are.  I’ve got the impression that you are something, that there’s a real ‘you’ in your inside.  But you don’t let me see it.  You send a polite servant to the door when I knock.  Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you.  But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving.  Come out, can’t you.  Let’s look at you.”

It was exactly that—­that brusque, unsentimental appeal—­that Michael needed.  He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a shelled and muffled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were, through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “It’s quite true what you tell me.  I’m like that.  But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know.”

Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on Michael.

“Good Lord, man!” he said; “people care if you’ll only allow them to.  The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness of oneself.  How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to care for?”

“But I’m completely uninteresting,” said Michael.

“Yes; I’ll judge of that,” said Falbe.

Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself, feeling at first as if he was undressing in public.  But as he went on he became conscious of the welcome that his story received, though that welcome only expressed itself in perfectly unemotional monosyllables.  He might be undressing, but he was undressing in front of a fire.  He knew that he uncovered himself to no icy blast or contemptuous rain, as he had felt when, so few days before, he had spoken of himself and what he was to his father.  There was here the common land of music to build upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been,