Harry caught his breath with pleasure. It was the unconscious fault of his adolescence that he was more eager to convey than receive; it was the complementary defect of the quality of enthusiasm which was Harry's strongest point. He had landed from his travels loaded like a gun with reminiscence and adventure, but the terrible return to the old home had damped his priming, and at the new home the future was the one affair of his own of which he had had time or heart to think. But now the things came back to him which he had come home longing to relate. He needed no second bidding from the sympathetic companion at his side, but began telling her, diffidently at first, then with all his boyish gusto as he caught and held her interest, the dozen and one experiences that had been on his tongue three days (that seemed three weeks) ago. To talk and be understood--to talk and be appreciated--it was half the battle of life with Harry Ringrose at this stage of his career. It is true that he had seen but little, and true that he had done still less, even in these two last errant years of his. But whatsoever he had seen or done, that had interested him in the least, he could bring home vividly enough to anybody who would give him a sympathetic hearing. And to do so was a deep and a strange delight to him; not, perhaps, altogether unconnected with mere vanity; but ministering also to a subtler sense of which the possessor was as yet unconscious. And Miss Lowndes listened to her young Othello, an older and more critical Desdemona, who liked him less for the dangers he had passed than for his ingenuous delight in recounting them. The talk indeed interested, but the talker charmed her, so that she was content to listen for the most part without a word. Meanwhile they were sauntering farther and farther afield, and at length the new Desdemona was compelled to tell Othello they must turn. He complied without pausing in the story. Her next interruption was more serious. "Don't you write?" she suddenly exclaimed. "Write what?" "Things for magazines." "I wish I did! The magazine at school was the only one I ever tried my hand for. Who told you I wrote?" "Mrs. Ringrose has shown things to my father, and he thought them very good. It only just struck me that what you are telling me would make such a capital magazine sketch. But it was very rude of me to interrupt. Please go on." "No, Miss Lowndes, I've gone on too long as it is! Here have I been talking away about Africa as though nothing had happened while I was there; and it's only three days since I landed and found out--everything!" His voice was strangely altered: the shame of forgetting, the pain of remembering, saddened and embittered every accent. Miss Lowndes, however, who had so plainly shared his enthusiasm, as plainly shrank from him in his depression. Harry was too taken up with his own feelings to notice this. Nor did he feel his companion's silence; for what was there to be said?