"Well then, my dear friend, if Clare Vawdrey is double (and I'm bound to say I think that the more of him the better), his lordship there has the opposite complaint: he isn't even whole." We stopped once more, simultaneously. "I don't understand." "No more do I. But I have a fancy that if there are two of Mr. Vawdrey, there isn't so much as one, all told, of Lord Mellifont." I considered a moment, then I laughed out. "I think I see what you mean!" "That's what makes _you_ a comfort. Did you ever see him alone?" I tried to remember. "Oh, yes; he has been to see me." "Ah, then he wasn't alone." "And I've been to see him, in his study." "Did he know you were there?" "Naturally--I was announced." Blanche Adney glanced at me like a lovely conspirator. "You mustn't be announced!" With this she walked on. I rejoined her, breathless. "Do you mean one must come upon him when he doesn't know it?" "You must take him unawares. You must go to his room--that's what you must do." If I was elated by the way our mystery opened out, I was also, pardonably, a little confused. "When I know he's not there?" "When you know he _is_." "And what shall I see?" "You won't see anything!" Mrs. Adney cried as we turned round. We had reached the end of the terrace, and our movement brought us face to face with Lord Mellifont, who, resuming his walk, had now, without indiscretion, overtaken us. The sight of him at that moment was illuminating, and it kindled a great backward train, connecting itself with one's general impression of the personage. As he stood there smiling at us and waving a practised hand into the transparent night (he introduced the view as if it had been a candidate and "supported" the very Alps), as he rose before us in the delicate fragrance of his cigar and all his other delicacies and fragrances, with more perfections, somehow, heaped upon his handsome head than one had ever seen accumulated before, he struck me as so essentially, so conspicuously and uniformly the public character that I read in a flash the answer to Blanche Adney's riddle. He was all public and had no corresponding private life, just as Clare Vawdrey was all private and had no corresponding public one. I had heard only half my companion's story, yet as we joined Lord Mellifont (he had followed us--he liked Mrs. Adney; but it was always to be conceived of him that he accepted society rather than sought it), as we participated for half an hour in the distributed wealth of his conversation, I felt with unabashed duplicity that we had, as it were, found him out. I was even more deeply diverted by that whisk of the curtain to which the actress had just treated me than I had been by my own discovery; and if I was not ashamed of my share of her secret any more than of having divided my own with her (though my own was, of the two mysteries, the more glorious for the personage involved), this was because there was no cruelty in my