"What would have been the good ?" "It's positive infatuation," agreed little Fyne, in the tone as though he had made an awful discovery.

"I have never seen anything so hopeless and inexplicable in my life.

I--I felt quite frightened and sorry," he added, while I looked at him curiously asking myself whether this excellent civil servant and notable pedestrian had felt the breath of a great and fatal love-spell passing him by in the room of that East-end hotel.

He did look for a moment as though he had seen a ghost, an other- world thing.

But that look vanished instantaneously, and he nodded at me with mere exasperation at something quite of this world--whatever it was.
"It's a bad business.