Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a moment in startled surprise. "What's that?" he asked sharply; "I didn't catch what you said." "Why, nothing--nothing--only they were telling me yesterday about how you--why, it just came over me that you _had_ had a great deal happen to you this last year, as well as I." He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case. "Oh, that!" he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. "I have lost my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past year." Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. "I was so sorry to hear that--about your father, I mean. And about the other--it must be very--_interesting_, I'm sure." His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting him see that she was not of the enemy, "I do hope some day you'll tell me all about it; it sounds so romantic." The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already away. His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded his feelings. "Oh, I'm sure you must have some good reason for doing such a _queer_ thing," she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, "Oh, I mean that it's very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage--perhaps something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you--" The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. "You're very kind," he said, "you're very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn't take any courage; quite the reverse. And it's not a picturesque way of doing a retreat from active life. I hope and pray that it's to be a way of getting into it." The girl's face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple of amusement still in his voice, "Ah, don't try to make me out. I don't belong in your world, you know; I'm real." Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further explanation. "You've given me my breakfast," he said, holding up the grapes; "I mustn't keep you any longer from yours." He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence. CHAPTER V THE DAY BEGINS