Edward Ambrose was the first to speak. But the laugh of gay charm was no longer on his lips. There was a look almost of horror in those honest eyes. "That's very interesting, my dear fellow," he said, with a change of tone so slight that it was hardly possible to detect it. "Interesting and curious that you should have met Horrobin." And then with a return to carelessness, as though no answer was required to a merely conventional inquiry: "What's he doing now, do you know?" The Sailor's almost uncanny power of memory was equal even to that question. "He's bear-leading the aristocracy," said the young man, with a proud exactitude of phrase. "Oh, really!" But in spite of the adroitness of the host, the tact of Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Barrington's feeling for the nuances, another pause followed. For one dark instant it was by no means clear to all three of them that their legs were not being pulled rather badly. This rare and strange young sea monster with a primeval simplicity of speech and manner, who had just absentmindedly quenched his thirst from his finger bowl, might not be all that he appeared. It seemed hardly possible to doubt the _bona fides_ of such a curiously charming child of nature, but.... For another brief and deadly moment, silence reigned. But in that moment, Mr. Henry Harper, with his new and rather terrible sensitiveness, was beginning to fear that he had committed a solecism. He remembered with a pang that Marlow's Dictionary had been unable to correlate "bear-leading" and "aristocracy." Clearly he had done wrong to make use of a phrase whose significance he did not fully understand, even though it was the phrase most certainly used by Mr. Esme Horrobin. It was pretending to a knowledge you didn't possess, and these gentlemen who had all been to college and to whom, therefore, pretence of any kind was entirely hateful.... "It's so like him!" The rare laugh of Edward Ambrose had come suddenly to the young man's aid. But the question for gods and men was: did Mr. Ambrose mean it was so like Mr. Esme Horrobin to be bear-leading the aristocracy, or so like Mr. Henry Harper to be using a phrase whose meaning was beyond him? "Alas, poor Esme!" sighed Mr. Ellis-Barrington. The Sailor echoed that sigh. His relief was profound that after all a pause so deadly had not been caused by himself. XVIII Henry Harper at this period of his life was in the grip of a single passion; the passion to know. Already he had learned that books, wonderful, enchanting as they were, formed only one avenue to the realms of truth. He had now come to realize that there are many secrets in earth and heaven which books, even the wisest of them, are not able to disclose.