It was the gentleman's smile that had done it; the irony _was_ there. "Ah there has been a great deal said." And Gedge's look at his interlocutor doubtless showed his sense of being sounded. It was extraordinary of course that a perfect stranger should have guessed the travail of his spirit, should have caught the gleam of his inner commentary. That probably leaked in spite of him out of his poor old eyes. "Much of it, in such places as this," he heard himself adding, "is of course said very irresponsibly." _Such places as this!_--he winced at the words as soon as he had uttered them. There was no wincing, however, on the part of his pleasant companions. "Exactly so; the whole thing becomes a sort of stiff smug convention--like a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish church--which you're a monster if you touch." "A monster," Gedge assented, meeting his eyes. The young man smiled, but he thought looking at him a little harder. "A blasphemer." "A blasphemer." It seemed to do his visitor good--he certainly _was_ looking at him harder. Detached as he was he was interested--he was at least amused. "Then you don't claim or at any rate don't insist----? I mean you personally." He had an identity for him, Gedge felt, that he couldn't have had for a Briton, and the impulse was quick in our friend to testify to this perception. "I don't insist to _you_." The young man laughed. "It really--I assure you if I may--wouldn't do any good. I'm too awfully interested." "Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in--a--pulling it down? That's rather in what you've said to me." "Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though quaking a little, "that he would like to pull it down?" She met, in her free sweetness, this appeal with such a charm! "Oh perhaps not quite the _house_----!" "Good. You see we live on it--I mean _we_ people." The husband had laughed, but had now so completely ceased to look about him that there seemed nothing left for him but to talk avowedly with the caretaker. "I'm interested," he explained, "in what I think _the_ interesting thing--or at all events the eternally tormenting one. The fact of the abysmally little that, in proportion, we know." "In proportion to what?" his companion asked. "Well, to what there must have been--to what in fact there _is_--to wonder about. That's the interest; it's immense. He escapes us like a thief at night, carrying off--well, carrying off everything. And people pretend to catch Him like a flown canary, over whom you can close your hand, and put Him back in the cage. He won't _go_ back; he won't _come_ back. He's not"--the young man laughed--"such a fool! It makes Him the happiest of all great men."