"Do you know what we half _did_ think----?" And then to her husband: "Is it dreadful to tell him?" They were in the room below, and the young woman, also relieved, expressed the feeling with gaiety. She smiled as before at Morris Gedge, treating him as a person with whom relations were possible, yet remaining just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes's opinion. "We _have_ awfully wanted--from what we had heard." But she met her husband's graver face; he was not quite out of the wood. At this she was slightly flurried--but she cut it short. "You must know--don't you?--that, with the crowds who listen to you, we'd have heard." He looked from one to the other, and once more again, with force, something came over him. They had kept him in mind, they were neither ashamed nor afraid to show it, and it was positively an interest on the part of this charming creature and this keen cautious gentleman, an interest resisting oblivion and surviving separation, that had governed their return. Their other visit had been the brightest thing that had ever happened to him, but this was the gravest; so that at the end of a minute something broke in him and his mask dropped of itself. He chucked, as he would have said, consistency; which, in its extinction, left the tears in his eyes. His smile was therefore queer. "Heard how I'm going it?" The young man, though still looking at him hard, felt sure, with this, of his own ground. "Of course you're tremendously talked about. You've gone round the world." "You've heard of me in America?" "Why almost of nothing else!" "That was what made us feel----!" Mrs. Hayes contributed. "That you must see for yourselves?" Again he compared, poor Gedge, their faces. "Do you mean I excite--a--scandal?" "Dear no! Admiration. You renew so," the young man observed, "the interest." "Ah there it is!" said Gedge with eyes of adventure that seemed to rest beyond the Atlantic. "They listen, month after month, when they're out here, as you must have seen; then they go home and talk. But they sing your praise." Our friend could scarce take it in. "Over _there_!" "Over there. I think you must be even in the papers." "Without abuse?" "Oh we don't abuse every one." Mrs. Hayes, in her beauty, it was clear, stretched the point. "They rave about you." "Then they _don't_ know?" "Nobody knows," the young man declared; "it wasn't any one's knowledge, at any rate, that made us uneasy." "It was your own? I mean your own sense?" "Well, call it that. We remembered, and we wondered what had happened. So," Mr. Hayes now frankly laughed, "we came to see." Gedge stared through his film of tears. "Came from America to see _me_?" "Oh a part of the way. But we wouldn't, in England, have missed you." "And now we _haven't_!" the young woman soothingly added. Gedge still could only gape at the candour of the tribute. But he tried to meet them--it was what was least poor for him--in their own key. "Well, how do you like it?"