Brissenden appeared to wonder where I was coming out, yet not as if he feared it. There was even a particular place, if I could but guess it, where he would have liked me to come. "Oh, she's extremely charming. But of course she's strikingly odd." "Odd?--really?" "Why, in the sense, I mean, that I thought you suggested you've noticed." "That of extravagant vivacity? Oh, I've had to notice it at a distance, without knowing what it represents." He just hesitated. "You haven't any idea at all what it represents?" "How should I have," I smiled, "when she never comes near me? I've thought _that_, as I tell you, marked. What does her avoidance of _me_ represent? Has she happened, with you, to throw any light on it?" "I think," said Brissenden after another moment, "that she's rather afraid of you." I could only be surprised. "The most harmless man in the house?" "_Are_ you really?" he asked--and there was a touch of the comic in hearing him put it with his inveterate gravity. "If you take me for anything else," I replied, "I doubt if you'll find anyone to back you." My companion, on this, looked away for a little, turned about, fixed his eyes on the house, seemed, as with a drop of interest, on the point of leaving me. But instead of leaving me he brought out the next moment: "I don't want anyone to back me. I don't care. I didn't mean just now," he continued, "that Mrs. Server has said to me anything against you, or that she fears you because she dislikes you. She only told me she thought you disliked _her_." It gave me a kind of shock. "A creature so beautiful, and so--so----" "So what?" he asked as I found myself checked by my desire to come to her aid. "Well, so brilliantly happy." I had all his attention again. "Is that what she _is_?" "Then don't you, with your opportunities, know?" I was conscious of rather an inspiration, a part of which was to be jocose. "What are you trying," I laughed, "to get out of me?" It struck me luckily that, though he remained as proof against gaiety as ever, he was, thanks to his preoccupation, not disagreeably affected by my tone. "Of course if you've no idea, I can get nothing." "No idea of what?" Then it was that I at last got it straight. "Well, of what's the matter with her." "Is there anything particular? If there _is_," I went on, "there's something that I've got out of _you_!" "How so, if you don't know what it is?" "Do you mean if you yourself don't?" But without detaining him on this, "Of what in especial do the signs," I asked, "consist?" "Well, of everyone's thinking so--that there's something or other." This again struck me, but it struck me too much. "Oh, everyone's a fool!" He saw, in his queer wan way, how it had done so. "Then you _have_ your own idea?" I daresay my smile at him, while I waited, showed a discomfort. "Do you mean people are talking about her?" But he waited himself. "Haven't they shown you----?" "No, no one has spoken. Moreover I wouldn't have let them."