“I thought of that,” replied Stephen, “when I saw John Baker standing to take his trial for murder, when he had been beside me, and both of us like brothers, for a month. There, thought I, stands the man, with the secret in him: and when he was questioning and cross-questioning one and another, it seemed a ridiculous beating about the bush, just for want of a window in his own breast, as you say. But I wonder what makes you think it will ever be otherwise. If men were all made alike, I grant you there would be a chance of all being known; for they are the fewest, I fancy, who can never be melted into telling everything. I am sure when an old comrade gets me beside him under a sunny hedge, or when Mr. Durell and I are over our spirit and water, there is nothing that in some moods I can keep to myself.” Anna inwardly wished that it might be so when he was sitting between two knitters, sociably learning their art. “But,” continued Stephen, “there are, and always will be, men whose taste is for secrecy. There will always be men who will no more make a clean or an open breast than they would pull their hearts out.” “They will be read, like others, for all that,” Anna said. “The longer men live together, and the more their eyes are turned upon each other, the more they learn to gather from signs. See how much doctors learn from marks which signify nothing to us, and the deaf from countenances, and the blind from tones of voice, and then tell me whether, if we were as observant as all these together, we might not read more of a man’s mind than we now think of. And if we also study the make of the mind as some have learned to do, we may get to know of things unseen, something in the way of the wise men who can tell us, years before, when a comet is coming,——” “Or of the common man who knew the exact spot where a lion was, miles off, before it could be either seen or heard.” “How was that?” asked Mrs. Le Brocq, with some scepticism in her tone. “He saw a large bird of prey in the air, so far off that it seemed but a speck. It hovered, which showed that there was a prey beneath; and it did not drop, which showed that something was beside the prey which prevented the bird from seizing it; and, from the nature of the country and of the bird, that something could be nothing but a lion; and a lion it was. It was by putting things together that the man knew this; and it is by putting things together that men will be known, if ever they are known.” “I am sure it is much to be wished that they should be,” sighed Anna. “Well, now, I don’t agree with you there. I think half the fun in life lies in men puzzling one another, and watching one another in their puzzle.”