The girl gazed at him more steadily. “I wonder if the judge and the doctor and Mrs. Vanderpool aren’t right, after all?” she observed slowly. “Let me look in your eyes, Mr. Bennett.” Bob did. Miss Gerald had heard that one could always tell crazy people by their eyes. She intended to sift this matter to the bottom and therefore proceeded with characteristic directness. Folk that were—well, “off,” she had been told, invariably showed that they were that, by a peculiar glitter. Miss Gerald gazed a few moments critically, steadily and with unswerving intention. Bob withstood that look with mingled wretchedness and rapture. He began to forget that they were just the eyes of a would-be expert on a mental matter, and his own eyes, looking deeper and deeper in those wonderful violet depths (he stood so she got the benefit of the moonlight) began to gleam with that old, old gleam Miss Gerald could remember in the past. Bob had never _talked_ love in those blissful days of yore, but he had looked it. “I don’t see any signs of insanity,” said the girl at length with cold assurance. That gleam wasn’t a glitter. Nothing crazy about it! She had seen it too often in other men’s eyes, as well as in Bob’s—not perhaps to such a marked degree in other men’s eyes,-but sufficiently so that she was fairly familiar with it. “You look normal enough to me.” “Thank you,” said Bob gratefully. “And that’s just why”—a slight frown on the smooth fine brow—“I don’t understand. Of course, a man not normal, might have answered as you did me (I’m not thinking of it as a personal matter, you will understand).” “Oh, I understand that,” returned Bob. “I’m just a problem, not a person.” She made him quite realize that. She made it perfectly and unmistakably apparent that he was, unto her, as some example in trigonometry, or geometry, or algebra, and she wanted to find the “solution.” He was an “X”—the unknown quantity. The expression on her patrician features was entirely scholastic and calculating. Bob now felt the ardor of his gaze becoming cold as moonlight. This wasn’t a lovers’ bower; it was only a _palestra_, or an observatory. “You haven’t answered me yet,” she said. No diverting her from her purpose! She was certainly persistent. “You insist I shall tell you why I didn’t want to see you?” She looked at him quickly. “That isn’t what I asked, Mr. Bennett. I asked you to explain that remark in the village.” “Same thing!” he murmured. “And it’s rather hard to explain, but if I’ve got to—?” He looked at her. On her face was the look of proud unyielding insistence. “Of course, I’ve got to tell you the truth,” said Bob, and his tone now was dead and dull. “In the first place, dad’s busted, clean down and out, and—well, I thought I wouldn’t see you any more.” “I fail to see the connection.” Her tones were as metallic as a voice like hers could make them.