“I have had a few sketches of the neighborhood,” he answered quickly, divining her fears. “She is an excellent mimic, I should suppose, but it is rather a dangerous quality. If you take me off, Miss Sophy, as you take off the old ladies, I shall not enjoy it.” Rosalind was relieved, he could see. She gave him a look that was almost grateful as she poured out his coffee, though he had done nothing to call forth her gratitude, any more than he had done anything last night to occasion her sorrow. A stranger in a new household, of which he has heard nothing before, being introduced into it, is like an explorer in an unknown country; he does not know when he may find himself on forbidden ground, or intruding into religious mysteries. He began to talk of himself, which seemed the safest subject; it was one which he was not eager to launch upon, but yet which had come in handy on many previous occasions. His life had been full of adventures. There were a hundred things in it to tell, and it had delivered him from many a temporary embarrassment to introduce a chapter out of his varied experiences. He had shot elephants in Africa and tigers in India. He had been a war-correspondent in the height of every military movement. “I have been one of the rolling stones that gather no moss,” he said, “though it is a kind of moss to have so many stories to tell. If the worst comes to the worst, I can go from house to house and amuse the children.” He did it so skilfully that Rosalind felt her agitation calmed. A man who could fall so easily into this narrative vein, and who was, apparently, so full of his own affairs, would not think twice, she reflected, of such a trifling incident as that of last night. If she had judged more truly, she would perhaps have seen that the observer who thus dismissed the incident totally, with such an absence of all consciousness on the subject, was precisely the one most likely to have perceived, even if he did not understand how, that it was an incident of great importance. But Rosalind was not sufficiently learned in moral philosophy to have found out that.