“Yes,” said Howard, “I feel that I have been very foolish—­but it has been going on all the time, like the music and the light.  It hasn’t been wasted.  I have had a wonderful talk with her to-day—­ the most wonderful talk, I think, I have ever had.  I can’t understand it all yet—­but she has given me the sense of some fine purpose—­as if I had been kept away for a purpose, because I was not ready; and as if I had come here for a purpose now.”

The girl sate looking at him with open eyes, and with some strange sense of surprise.  “Yes,” she said, “it is just like that; but that you could have seen it so soon amazes me.  I have known her all my life, and could never have put that into words.  Do you know how things seem to come and go and shift about without any meaning?  It is never so with her; she sees what it all means.  I cannot explain it.”

They sate in silence for a moment, and then Howard said:  “It is very curious to be here; you know, or probably you don’t know, how much interested I am in Jack; and somehow in talking to him I felt that there was something behind—­something more to know.  All this”—­ he waved his hand at the room—­“my aunt, your father, yourself—­it does not seem to me new and unfamiliar, but something which I have always known.  I can’t tell you in what a dream I have seemed to be moving ever since I came here.  I have been here for twenty-four hours, and yet it seems all old and dear to me.”

“I know that feeling,” said the girl, “one dips into something that has been going on for ever and ever—­I feel like that to-night.  It seems odd to talk like this, but you must remember that Jack tells me most things, and I seem to know you quite well.  I knew it would be all easy somehow.”

“Well, we are a sort of cousins,” said Howard lightly.  “That’s such a comfort; it needn’t entail anything, but it can save one all sorts of fencing and ceremony.  I want to talk to you about Jack.  He is a little mysterious to me still.”

“Yes,” she said, “he is mysterious, but he really is a dear:  he was the most aggravating boy that ever lived, and I sometimes used really to hate him.  I am afraid we used to fight a great deal; at least I did, but I suppose he was only pretending, for he never hurt me, and I know I used to hurt him—­but then he deserved it!”

“What a picture!” said Howard, smiling; “no wonder that boys go to their private schools expecting to have to fight for their lives.  I never had a sister; and that accounts perhaps for my peaceful disposition.”  He had a sudden sense as he spoke that he was talking as if to an undergraduate in friendly irony.  To his surprise and pleasure he saw that his thought had translated itself.

“I suppose that is how you talk to your pupils,” said the girl, smiling; “I recognise that—­and that’s what makes it easy to talk to you as Jack does—­it’s like an easy serve at lawn-tennis.”

“I am glad it is easy,” said Howard, “you don’t know how many of my serves go into the net!”