“Wait, Feller!  Three of us share the secret now.  These are Miss Galland’s premises.  I thought best that she should know everything,” said Lanstron.

“Everything!” exclaimed Feller.  “Everything—­” the word caught in his throat.  “You mean my story, too?” He was neither young nor old now.  He seemed nondescript and miserable.  “She knows who I am?” he asked.

“Yes!” Lanstron answered.

“Lanny!” This almost reproachfully, as if the ethics of friendship had been abused.

“Yes.  I’m sorry, Gustave.  I—­” Lanstron began miserably.

“But why not?” said Feller, with a wan attempt at a smile.  “You see—­I mean—­it does not matter!” he concluded in a hopeless effort at philosophy.

“My thoughtlessness, my callousness, my obsession with my work!  I should not have told your story,” said Lanstron.

“His story!” exclaimed Marta, with a puzzled look to Lanstron before she turned to Feller with a look of warm sympathy.  “Why, there is no story!  You came with excellent recommendations.  You are our very efficient gardener.  That is all we need to know.  Isn’t that the way you wish it, Mr. Feller?”

“Yes, just that!” he said softly, raising his eyes to her in gratitude.  “Thank you, Miss Galland!”

He was going after another “Thank you!” and a bow; going with the slow step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized his hands in a firm caress.

“Forgive me, Gustave!” he begged.  “Forgive the most brutal of all injuries—­that which wounds a friend’s sensibilities.”

“Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny,” he said, returning Lanstron’s pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness.  Then his attitude changed to one of doubt and inquiry.  “And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?” he asked, turning to Marta.  “That is how you happened to get the whole story?  Tell me, honestly!”

“Yes”

“Had you suspected me before that?”

“Yes, if you must know.  I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could not see,” she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him.  There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge.  Suddenly he smiled as he had at the bumblebee.

“There you are again, confound you!” he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden.  “Did anyone else suspect?” he asked in fierce intensity.

“No, I don’t think so.”

He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.

“You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland,” he said with a charming bow, “and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a fair test.  That little thunderer will not get me again.  I’ll fool the ones I want to fool.  And I’m learning, Lanny, learning all the time—­getting a little deafer all the time.  Miss Galland,” he added, struck in visible contrition by a new thought, “I am sorry”—­he paused with head down for an instant—­“very sorry to have deceived you.”