“Not a bit,” she lied. But as she watched him draw her glove through his fingers, gently, gently, her anger really did die down, and besides, at the moment he looked more like himself of six years ago. . . . “What I really wanted then,” he said softly, “was to be a sort of carpet—to make myself into a sort of carpet for you to walk on so that you need not be hurt by the sharp stones and the mud that you hated so. It was nothing more positive than that—nothing more selfish. Only I did desire, eventually, to turn into a magic carpet and carry you away to all those lands you longed to see.” As he spoke she lifted her head as though she drank something; the strange beast in her bosom began to purr. . . . “I felt that you were more lonely than anybody else in the world,” he went on, “and yet, perhaps, that you were the only person in the world who was really, truly alive. Born out of your time,” he murmured, stroking the glove, “fated.” Ah, God! What had she done! How had she dared to throw away her happiness like this. This was the only man who had ever understood her. Was it too late? Could it be too late? _She_ was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . . “And then the fact that you had no friends and never had made friends with people. How I understood that, for neither had I. Is it just the same now?” “Yes,” she breathed. “Just the same. I am as alone as ever.” “So am I,” he laughed gently, “just the same.” Suddenly with a quick gesture he handed her back the glove and scraped his chair on the floor, “But what seemed to me so mysterious then is perfectly plain to me now. And to you, too, of course. . . . It simply was that we were such egoists, so self-engrossed, so wrapped up in ourselves that we hadn’t a corner in our hearts for anybody else. Do you know,” he cried, naive and hearty, and dreadfully like another side of that old self again, “I began studying a Mind System when I was in Russia, and I found that we were not peculiar at all. It’s quite a well known form of . . .” She had gone. He sat there, thunder-struck, astounded beyond words. . . . And then he asked the waitress for his bill. “But the cream has not been touched,” he said. “Please do not charge me for it.” The Little Governess