“I’m not so sure,” replied the acute doctor. “I believe I know you better than you know yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I believe you would find it very difficult not to tell somebody.” Pocket admitted it with a natural outburst of his leading quality. In truth no previous act or word of Baumgartner’s had inspired such confidence as this unerring piece of insight. It seemed to the boy a perfect miracle of discernment. He was not old enough to know that what he would have done, in his weakness, most grown-up men and women of his temperament would have done in theirs. “Remember,” resumed the doctor, “you would have the whole of to-day to account for; it’s not as though you wouldn’t have some very awkward questions to answer the moment you got back to school.” And again the lad marvelled at this intuition into public-school conditions on the part of one who could have no first-hand knowledge of those insular institutions. But this fresh display of understanding only confirmed him in his resolve. “I trust you, sir,” said he; “haven’t you done enough for me to make me? I put myself, as you say, absolutely in your hands; and I’m grateful to you for all you’ve done and whatever you mean to do!” “Even though it comes to hiding with us here in London?” “No matter what it comes to,” cried Pocket, strangely exalted now, “so long as my people never know!” “They may think you dead.” He thought of saying that he wished he was; but it would not have been true; even then it would have been a lie, and Pocket was not the boy to tell one if he knew it. “That would be better than knowing what I have done,” was what he said; and in his exaltation he believed no less. “You quite see that you are taking a step which must be final?” “It is final—absolutely—so far as I am concerned.” And it was meant to be, in all good faith; the very fulness and fairness of the doctor’s warnings served but to strengthen that resolve. But Baumgartner, as if to let well or ill alone, dropped the matter with a clinching shrug; and presently he left his visitor, less wisely, to brood on it alone. Pocket was a dab at brooding! That is the worst of your conscientious ass; he takes his decision like a man; he means to stick to it like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering whether he has decided for the best, and what would have happened if he had decided otherwise, and what his world will say about him as it is.