corin, from the depths of one armchair, regarded john in the depths of another.

“for sheer, racy, brilliant conversation commend me to you,” he remarked sarcastically. “for the last hour at least—i’ve had my eye on the clock—you’ve uttered no single word. you’ve rivalled the immortal william’s lover in your sighs. talk of a furnace, it’s like ten furnaces you’ve been. sigh, sigh, and again sigh. what’s the matter with you, man? is it love, sorrow, or remorse for an ill-spent youth? come, out with it. disburden your soul of the worm i’ the bud which is feeding on your damask cheek. speak, i implore you.”

john roused himself.

“oh,” he responded airily enough, “in the matter of conversation i fancied we’d had enough [pg 86]of it at dinner—supper—whatever the original, but wholly appetizing meal might be called. we conversed pretty tolerably, i fancy.”

“conversation!” corin’s voice expressed a depth of utter scorn. “conversation! if that’s what he calls the airy, frothy, soap-bubble words which fell from his lips! oh, you didn’t deceive me. i saw in them the mere cloak to an aching heart. you just over-did the lighthearted careless rôle. you’ve said fifty times more in the last hour. but now i want the translation, the interpretation. where’s the use of first frivolling, and then glooming? strike the happy medium. come, consider me a confidant,” he ended on a note of coaxing.

john laughed. then he relapsed into gloom, frowning.

“it’s no laughing matter,” he said.

“it wasn’t i who laughed,” urged corin gently. “come, tell me.”

“oh, well,” said john stretching out his legs. and forthwith he set himself to speak, succinctly, concisely.

“bless the man!” cried corin at the end of the recital, “so it’s that that’s weighing on his mind.”

[pg 87]

“well?” demanded john surprised, and not a little injured. “and isn’t it enough to weigh on a man’s mind? isn’t it an entirely unparalleled situation? isn’t it an unthinkable, inconceivable situation?”

corin waved his cigarette in the air.

“oh, i’ll grant you all that. but you’re too susceptible. you’re too—too ultra-sympathetic. it isn’t your castle. it isn’t your relation that has appeared unwanted from the other side of nowhere. it isn’t you who have got to take a back seat and see americans vault over your head into the position you have just vacated.” he stopped.

“oh, well,” said john frigidly, “if that’s the way you look at things.”

corin sighed.

“it’s the only sensible way.”

“hang sense,” muttered john.

“my dear fellow,” urged corin soothingly, “look at matters in a reasonable light. here are you sighing, frowning, suffering real mental pain on behalf of a family—a quite picturesque and interesting family, i’ve no doubt, but one with which you have the barest bowing acquaintance,[pg 88] the merest superficial knowledge. your attitude isn’t reasonable, it’s altogether exaggerated and beside the mark.”

“it’s merely ordinary decent human sympathy,” retorted john.

corin raised his light arched eyebrows till they nearly touched his light straight hair.

“then,” he remarked coolly, “defend me from your company when you are suffering from extraordinary human sympathy. seriously, though,” he went on, “aren’t you being a trifle exalté in the matter? aren’t you plunging the sword of sympathy a bit too deeply into your heart? for a moment—just for one brief infinitesimal moment—consider facts as they are. here are we two, dropped by the merest chance upon this place, fallen upon it by the merest freak of fortune—three weeks ago i’d never even heard of its existence—and we’ve really no more individual connection with it than with—with mount popocatepetl. what possible reason, or, i might say, what right or justification, has either one of us to take to heart the private and personal trials of a family living here. it’s—it’s almost an impertinence. we aren’t in the picture at all. we’re [pg 89]altogether superfluous to them. look at the whole thing from the point of view of an audience,” continued corin blandly. “a month or two hence the curtain will have fallen on this little drama, as far as we are concerned. we aren’t on the stage at all.”

john smiled, a little grim smile, provoked, no doubt, by the eminent common-sense of corin’s statement.

“you have a really wonderfully level way of regarding matters,” he remarked.

“isn’t it common-sense?” demanded corin.

“oh, yes, it’s common-sense right enough,” conceded john airily.

“you see,” continued corin, secretly immensely pleased with what he considered the success of his theorems, “you see it is absolutely and entirely impossible for us as individuals to take to heart, deeply to heart, each individual grief of each individual person in the world. consider, man, if one did, every perusal of the daily papers would be fraught with soul-agonizings, with horrible heart-burnings. it would become a sheer wasting of the nervous tissues, an utter and entire uneconomic expenditure of the sympathies. also,” concluded[pg 90] corin, speaking now at top speed, “though you, in your isolated superiority of an orthodox religion, refuse to admit my theories, it is nevertheless a fact that all suffering is the outcome of justice, in a word, of karma, the inevitable demand for the payment of those debts which every individual has at one time or another voluntarily contracted.”

john grinned.

“i’ve heard that theory of yours before,” he remarked.

“oh, i know your didymusical tendencies,” retorted corin.

john laughed.

“i should have supposed,” quoth he, “that the shoe fitted another foot.”

but in his heart he was considering three points—three questions raised by a previous speech in the foregoing conversation. firstly, was it a mere freak of fortune that had brought him to malford? secondly, would the curtain presently fall on the drama so far as he was concerned? thirdly, had father maloney considered his palpable sympathy in the business an impertinence?

[pg 91]

to firstly and secondly his heart cried an emphatic negative. thirdly, after all, was a minor consideration; but, having in mind father maloney’s shrewd old eyes, john was disposed to answer that question likewise in the negative.