“If only I had met you before!” she murmured.

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Don’t ask me,” she begged.  “It would not be good for your conceit, if you have any, to tell you.”

“I have no conceit and I am not inquisitive,” he said, “but I do not see why you laughed.”

Their period of waiting came to an end at this point.  The fish was brought and their conversation became disjointed.  In the silence which followed, the old shadow crept over her face.  Once only it lifted.  It was while they were waiting for the cutlets.  She leaned towards him, her elbows upon the tablecloth, her face supported by her fingers.

“I think that it is time we left these generalities,” she insisted, “and you told me something rather more personal, something which I am very anxious to know.  Tell me exactly why so self-centered a person as yourself should interest himself in a fellow-creature at all.  It seems odd to me.”

“It is odd,” he admitted, frankly.  “I will try to explain it to you but it will sound very bald, and I do not think that you will understand.  I watched you a few nights ago out on the roof at Blenheim House.  You were looking across the house-tops and you didn’t seem to be seeing anything at all really, and yet all the time I knew that you were seeing things I couldn’t, you were understanding and appreciating something which I knew nothing of, and it worried me.  I tried to talk to you that evening, but you were rude.”

“You really are a curious person,” she remarked.  “Are you always worried, then, if you find that some one else is seeing things or understanding things which are outside your comprehension?”

“Always,” he replied promptly.

“You are too far-reaching,” she affirmed.  “You want to gather everything into your life.  You cannot.  You will only be unhappy if you try.  No man can do it.  You must learn your limitations or suffer all your days.”

“Limitations!” He repeated the words with measureless scorn.  “If I learn them at all,” he declared, with unexpected force, “it will be with scars and bruises, for nothing else will content me.”

“We are, I should say, almost the same age,” she remarked slowly.

“I am twenty-five,” he told her.

“I am twenty-two,” she said.  “It seems strange that two people whose ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have come together like this even for a moment.  I do not understand it at all.  Did you expect that I should tell you just what I saw in the clouds that night?”

“No,” he answered, “not exactly.  I have spoken of my first interest in you only.  There are other things.  I told a lie about the bracelet and I followed you out of the boarding-house and I brought you here, for some other for quite a different reason.”

“Tell me what it was,” she demanded.

“I do not know it myself,” he declared solemnly.  “I really and honestly do not know it.  It is because I hoped that it might come to me while we were together, that I am here with you at this moment.  I do not like impulses which I do not understand.”