It was so funny that it set me thinking afresh and that, with the interest of it, which became a positive excitement, I had to keep myself in hand in order not too publicly to explain, not to break out right and left with my reflections. I don't know why--it was a sense instinctive and unreasoned, but I felt from the first that if I was on the scent of something ultimate I had better waste neither my wonder nor my wisdom. I _was_ on the scent--that I was sure of; and yet even after I was sure I should still have been at a loss to put my enigma itself into words. I was just conscious, vaguely, of being on the track of a law, a law that would fit, that would strike me as governing the delicate phenomena--delicate though so marked--that my imagination found itself playing with. A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from my exaggerating them--grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a larger "law") than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession. The obsession pays, if one will; but to pay it has to borrow. After dinner, but while the men were still in the room, I had some talk again with Long, of whom I inquired if he had been so placed as to see "poor Briss." He appeared to wonder, and poor Briss, with our shifting of seats, was now at a distance. "I think so--but I didn't particularly notice. What's the matter with poor Briss?" "That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me. But if nothing, in him, strikes you----!" He met my eyes a moment--then glanced about. "Where is he?" "Behind you; only don't turn round to look, for he knows----" But I dropped, having caught something directed toward me in Brissenden's face. My interlocutor remained blank, simply asking me, after an instant, what it was he knew. On this I said what I meant. "He knows we've noticed." Long wondered again. "Ah, but I _haven't_!" He spoke with some sharpness. "He knows," I continued, noting the sharpness too, "what's the matter with him." "Then what the devil is it?" I waited a little, having for the moment an idea on my hands. "Do you see him often?" Long disengaged the ash from his cigarette. "No. Why should I?" Distinctly, he was uneasy--though as yet perhaps but vaguely--at what I might be coming to. That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me. "Do you mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?" On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard. "'Strikes' me--in that boy? Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life. He's not an object of the smallest interest to me!"