“Nothing that I have ever done,” he sighed, “is worth talking to you about.  But if you are going to be my friend—­”

“Well?”

“If you are going to be my friend,” he went on, with almost inspired conviction, “I shall write something different.”

“One can rebuild,” she murmured.  “One can sometimes use the old pieces.  Life and chess are both like that.”

“Would you help me, I wonder?” he asked impulsively.

She looked away from him, out across the steamer rail.  She seemed to be measuring with her eyes the roll of the ship as it rose and fell in the trough of the sea.

“You are a strange person,” she said.  “Tell me, are you in the habit of becoming suddenly dependent upon people?”

“Not I,” he assured her.  “If I were to tell you how my last ten years have been spent, you would not believe me.  You couldn’t.  If I were to speak of a tearing, unutterable loneliness, if I were to speak of poverty—­not the poverty you know anything about, but the poverty of bare walls, of coarse food and little enough of it, of everything cheap and miserable and soiled and second-hand—­nothing fresh, nothing real—­”

He stopped abruptly.

“But I forgot,” he muttered.  “I can’t explain.”

“Is one to understand,” she asked, a little puzzled, “that you have had difficulties in your business?”

“I have never been in business,” he answered quickly.  “My name is Romilly, but I am not Romilly the manufacturer.  For the last eight years I have lived in a garret in London, teaching false art in a third-rate school some of the time, doing penny-a-line journalistic work when I got the chance; clerk for a month or two in a brewer’s office and sacked for incapacity—­those are a few of the real threads in my life.”

“At the present moment, then,” she observed, “you are an impostor.”

“Exactly,” he admitted, “and I should probably have been repenting it by now but for your words last night.”

She smiled at him and the sun shone once more.  It wasn’t an ordinary smile at all.  It was just as though she were letting him into the light of her understanding, as though some one from the world, entrance into which he had craved, had stooped down to understand and was telling him that all was well.  He drew his chair a little closer to hers.

“We are all more or less impostors,” she said.  “Does any one, I wonder, go about the world telling everybody what they really are, how they really live?  Dear me, how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be!  You are so wise, my new friend.  You know the value of impulses.  You tell me the truth, and I am your friend.  I do not need facts, because facts count for little.  I judge by what lies behind, and I understand.  Do not weary me with explanations.  I like what you have told me.  Only, of course, your work must have suffered from surroundings like that.  Will it be better for you now?”