When she had finished her vivacious recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely about himself, with the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who has reduced life to a gesture, a manner.

"I wonder if he has ever really cared about anything--even about me ?" she questioned, after a minute; but while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow and his tenderness.

"I have seemed only half alive since I lost her," he said; and the words were like a searchlight which flashed over his character and illumined its obscurities.

Did his whole attitude of immobility and negation result from the depth and the intensity of his feeling, from the exquisite reticence and sensitiveness of his soul?
"I know, I know," she murmured in a voice of sympathy.

After all, she was not disappointed in him.