This was all so foreign to his Near Oriental vocabulary that I nearly laughed. But not quite. For it was being borne in upon me still more clearly that I didn’t care for this suggestion of his at all. He was actually asking for my help and co-operation, not in a sham rôle, but a _real_ one? Well, I thought, what _cheek_! “If you mean,” I said, “that you want me to promise not to ‘rag’—not to—to banter you again about all this; not to go on saying things that mean one thing for you and another to whoever else hears them, and all that——” I was going to say that this I might promise; although I felt he was asking for a good deal—for his official _fiancée’s_ one safety-valve, in fact! “No, no! That’s not what I mean,” he put in. “When I say ‘friends,’ I mean it. Genuine friends. On the terms we might be on if we weren’t en—if we hadn’t this ‘engagement’ between us.” “How _can_ we be that?” said I emphatically. “Why can’t we?” he persisted. “Why? Because I—I don’t see how I could be expected to answer such a question!” He didn’t _say_, “You agreed to the other!” But I knew some men might. So I went on trying to explain to this specially obtuse one. “Don’t you see how much easier it is to pretend to be engaged or even—in love with a person, than to turn round and _like_ them because you’re asked to?” “Is it?” “But of _course_ it is!” said I. “One _can_ act being—engaged and all that. One can’t force oneself into friendship, real liking.” (Stupid, he was; it was just like his not seeing the difference between accepting furs—and a frock!) “One simply can’t make oneself _like_. That is asking too much. And I never bargained for it. It wasn’t——” —“In the arrangement,” I nearly said. I might just as well have said it! For: “Damn—dash that infernal arrangement!” muttered my employer heatedly, crunching, in the absence of Cariad, the well-kept gravel beneath his heel. “Can’t you forget that, leave that alone for the time being? It would be so much easier——” “Yes! For you perhaps!” I retorted. “But not easy for me; and it’s impossible for me to feel like being ‘friends’ to order!” He said nothing for a minute. Then he began again quietly. “You mean you dislike me?” “I don’t even know you well enough for really liking or disliking,” I argued coldly. “And besides, what have we—you and I—in common, that we should expect to get on well together?” I knew what a hopeless question _that_ is to answer about almost any two persons! He said rather helplessly, “Well, but hang it all! What have you in common with——” Here I _felt_, suspended between us in the dusk like a Mahomet’s coffin, the name of Sydney Vandeleur! But the Governor changed his mind about uttering it. He _said_: “For instance, what can you have in common with a man like Montresor? You’re twenty-one. He’s what?—Fifty? Sixty? Yet you can talk—you can——You seem to get on all right with him.” “Naturally!” I said. The Governor said nothing.