She answered, with a curious, far-away sadness in her voice: "I wasn't--_anything_--to him--except a teacher. I was teaching him all sorts of little things that he'll need to know in the world--little tricks of the trade of living--I was trying to lessen the probability that wherever he goes and whatever he does, he'll be the prey of men not half as strong and not a tenth as good. And I was trying to show him how big the world was, and how, even with his ideals, it couldn't all be seen from a laboratory window.... I took him to all sorts of places--educating him, in a sort of way--trying to--to----" Oh, that talk of _teaching_ and _educating_! From her lips it exasperated me as much as it had from his; it drove me into saying something that I have regretted ever since. "You may have tried," I interrupted sharply, "but you didn't succeed. Even you can't change the nature of him, and all the time you thought he was learning to be a social success, he was merely learning to love you.... _That's_ what you taught him--nothing else. And that's why I judged the situation to be so dangerous that the sooner he cleared out of it the better." I say I have regretted it ever since, and that's the bitter truth. I began regretting about a second after I had spoken, for she answered, with a calm smile and a thrill of pride in her voice: "I knew, of course, that he loved me, because he told me so. But he didn't tell _you_ to tell me, and I despise you utterly for doing it. You have abused his confidence.... It's no good arguing after a thing like that.... I think you'd better get me a taxi and let me go...." VI I got her a taxi, and she went, and I didn't see or speak to her again for years. That is the sort of thing which, when one writes it down, gives one a sense of bewilderment. Such a little, paltry quarrel to have caused such a long estrangement! I wrote down in my diary on the evening of the day it happened: "Met H. in Fleet Street. Tiff over T." I was so sure, at the time, that it was only a tiff. I had to leave London the next morning for a week's reporting job in South Wales, and I never doubted that by the time I returned the quarrel would be forgotten. Yet it wasn't. I remember in particular one hot August afternoon shortly after I came back. Severn had invited me to lunch with him at White's, and during the meal he talked and discussed in his usual brilliant way. But afterwards, while we mellowed ourselves with port, he said suddenly: "I say, Hilton, old chap, what on earth have you been saying to my wife?" How could I tell him _anything_, much less _everything_? I laughed to gain time to think, and then I asked him rather stammeringly what exactly he meant. He answered: "It's rather queer. She seems to have taken a sudden dislike to you.... I'm giving a farewell party next week--just a little dinner before we go out of town. I suppose you got the invitation?" "Yes. I was intending to reply to it to-night." "Accepting?" "Well--yes."