I was swept by an intense longing that she should be told. It was a longing I was never free from, though it didn’t often seize me so imperiously as to-night. It seized me the more imperiously owing to the fact that I could see her moving farther and farther away from any recollection and realization coming through herself. I had hoped that both would occur to her without my being obliged to say in so many words, “I am the man who tried a few months ago to steal your jewelry.” But if ever the shadow of this suggestion crossed her mind, it didn’t cross it now. From the beginning the face and figure of that man had been blurred behind the memory of my brother Jack. Recent events had fixed me, just as she saw me, definitely in conditions in which sneak-thieving is unimaginable. I was the son of Sir Edward Melbury, Baronet, of Montreal and Ottawa, a man who would rank among the notables of the continent. Though a son in disfavor, I was still a son, and moreover I was exercising an honorable craft with some credit. I might propose to her, I might marry her, I might live my whole life with her, and the chances were that she would never connect me with the man she had seen for a few hurried minutes on pulling the rose-colored hangings aside. For this very reason it seemed to me I must tell her before our friendship went any further. It was an additional reason that I began to think that the information would be a shock to her. How I got that impression I can scarcely tell you; the ways in which it was conveyed to me were so trifling, so infinitesimal. For example, I asked her one day what she meant by her oft-repeated statement that I was different from other men. “Our men,” she explained, promptly, “have no life apart from their businesses and professions. Business and profession are stamped all over them. They are in their clothes, their faces, the tones of their voices. You’d know Ralph Coningsby was an architect, and Stephen Cantyre a doctor, and Rufus Legrand a clergyman, the minute you heard them speak. Now you wouldn’t know what you were. You might be anything—anything a gentleman can be, that is. I’ve heard some one say that Oxford is a town in a university, and Cambridge a university in a town. In just the same way my father, for instance, is a man in an architect. You’re an architect in a man. With you the man is the bigger. With us he’s the smaller. It isn’t merely business before pleasure; it’s business before human nature; and somehow I’ve a preference for seeing human nature put first.” There was little in this to say what I have just hinted at. There was barely sufficient to let me see that she was putting me above most of her men acquaintances, in a place in which I had no right to be. Though it was as far as she ever went, it was far enough to create my suspicion and to make me feel that the earliest confession would not come too soon.