that startled me: “Ah, I’m not a bit engaged to her, you know!” “Not overtly,” I answered, “because her mother doesn’t like you. But I’ve always taken for granted a private understanding.” “Well, there _was_ one. But there isn’t now.” That was all he said, except something about Mrs. Erme’s having got on her feet again in the most extraordinary way--a remark from which I gathered he wished me to think he meant that private understandings were of little use when the doctor didn’t share them. What I took the liberty of really thinking was that the girl might in some way have estranged him. Well, if he had taken the turn of jealousy for instance it could scarcely be jealousy of me. In that case (besides the absurdity of it) he wouldn’t have gone away to leave us together. For some time before his departure we had indulged in no allusion to the buried treasure, and from his silence, of which mine was the consequence, I had drawn a sharp conclusion. His courage had dropped, his ardour had gone the way of mine--this inference at least he left me to enjoy. More than that he couldn’t do; he couldn’t face the triumph with which I might have greeted an explicit admission. He needn’t have been afraid, poor dear, for I had by this time lost all need to triumph. In fact I considered that I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him with his collapse, for the sense of his having thrown up the game made me feel more than ever how much I at last depended on him. If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any use if _he_ wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit true that I had ceased to care for knowledge; little by little my curiosity had not only begun to ache again, but had become the familiar torment of my consciousness. There are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don’t know after all why I should in this connection so much as mention them. For the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick’s absence that she made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed upon her, and in her presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of “Deep Down” again: it was a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still more remarkably pulled her.