I went outside before turning in, leaving Falkner in the sulks. The rain had ceased, and bright patches of stars were shining between the parting clouds. The fire had died low, and the conversation of the boys had dropped too. I can always think best out in the open, and now I set myself hard to think over these last developments. By its date the letter must have been nearly a week on the road. Well, there was not time for much to have happened in between. Then what Falkner had just revealed had come to me as something of an eye-opener. I had at first rather suspected him of resenting me as an interloper, but subsequently as I noted the free and easy terms on which he stood with both his cousins--the one equally with the other--the last thing to enter my mind was that he should think seriously of either of them, and that one Aida. Why, she used to keep him in order and treat him very much as a boy-- indeed all her references to him when discussing him with me, even as lately as in the letter I had just received, bore the same elder sisterly tone, and I felt sure that while this held good, Falkner, in entertaining the hopes he had revealed to me, was simply twisting for himself a rope of sand. At the same time I felt sorry for him, and my not unnatural resentment of the very dictatorial tone which he had chosen to adopt towards myself cooled entirely. He was young and so boyish that every allowance must be made. At the same time I envied him his youth. As for me, well I hardly knew, but as my meditations ran on in the stillness and silence of the starlit night, clustering ever around one recollection, well I realised, and not for the first time, that life seemed very much to have been wasted in my case. The one talent man in the parable recurred to my mind, and I will even own, I hope not irreverently, to a sneaking sympathy for that same poor devil. He might have lost his one talent, or fooled it away, instead of which, he at any rate kept it--and, after all there is a saying that it is more difficult to keep money than to make it. Now it seemed to me that I was very much in the same boat with him. I had kept my talent-- so far--and was it even now too late to add to it, but--what the deuce had this got to do with Aida Sewin, who formed the undercurrent of all the riotous meditations in which I was indulging? Well perhaps it had something. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. DOLF NORBURY AGAIN. When two people, trekking together beyond the confines of civilisation fall out, the situation becomes unpleasant. If each has his own waggon, well and good, they can part company, but if not, and both are bound to stick together it spells friction. For this reason I have always preferred trekking alone.