“I don’t know,” said Bill gently. Then Mrs. Fazackerly, very much in earnest and hating to say it, made one of the moral efforts of her life and asked him if he really thought that his--his attraction--his _strong_ attraction, if he liked--to this woman older than himself, was anything more than the accident of falling in love, to which every normal man or woman is liable. She was frightened when she said it, because she thought that he would repent of his confidence to her and think her unworthy of it. Bill looked at her through the glasses, and smiled a little, and took both her hands, which were shaking, into his, comforting her. “It’s awfully good of you to say that, because I know you mind saying it, and I think--I think you only said it because you thought you ought to. (I hope that doesn’t sound like the most frightful cheek. It isn’t meant to.) In a way, I know it must look like that, of course--I mean, like my being just in love with her, and nothing else. And of course I _am_ in love with her, too.” Suddenly he was blinking, behind his glasses, and looking very young and very shy. Nancy said that his utter sincerity and his earnestness brought a lump into her throat. Her judgments of other people are always gentle ones, but I think she felt that Diamond Harter wasn’t worth it, just then. “Tell me what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I understand altogether. You said you were in love with her, ‘_too_?’” “Well,” Bill explained in a reasonable voice, “you know what falling in love is--a thing nobody can control, or explain, or produce if it isn’t there of itself. That’s the part that might, as you said, overtake anybody. It did overtake me, as a matter of fact, the night that we heard her sing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert. Do you remember? I didn’t begin to know about the other part of it till later--well, not _much_ later--but the night we met at this house and sang and that I saw her home afterwards.” “But _what_ other part of it?” wailed Nancy, in despair. “Do you mean that you think you met in a--a former life--something like that?” No, Bill didn’t mean anything a bit like that. If people had former lives at all, perhaps he and Mrs. Harter might have met in them, but he’d never thought about it, and anyway, he didn’t think he believed in reincarnation. “More like finding your affinity?” Nancy then suggested. More like that, Bill agreed, but he didn’t seem to think that it was exactly that, either.