“It was because I didn’t know any better,” he burst out, in naA-ve self-reproach.  “It was because I couldn’t recognize the high, the fine thing when I saw it.  I’ve had that experience in other ways, and with just the same result.  It was like that when I first began to hear good music.  I couldn’t make it out—­it was nothing but a crash of sounds.  I preferred the ditties and dances of a musical comedy; and it was only by degrees that I began to find them flat.  Then my ear caught something of the wonderful things in the symphonies that used to bore me.  You see, I’m slow—­I’m stupid—­”

“Not at all,” she smiled.  “It’s quite a common experience.”

“But I’m like that all through, with everything.  I’ve been like that—­with women.  I used to be attracted by quite an ordinary sort.  It’s taken me years—­all these years, till I’m thirty-three—­to see that there’s a perfect expression of the human type, just as there’s a perfect expression of any kind of art.  And I’ve found it.”

He bent farther forward, nearer to her.  There was a light in his face that seemed to her to denote enthusiasm quite as much as love.  To her wider experience in emotions this discovery of himself, which was involved in his discovery of her, was rather youthful, provoking a faint smile.

“You’re to be congratulated, then,” she said, with an air of distant friendliness.  “It isn’t every one who’s so fortunate.”

“That’s true.  There’s only one man in the world who’s more fortunate than I. That’s Conquest.”

“Oh!”

In the brusqueness with which she started she pushed her chair slightly back from him.  It was to conceal her agitation that she rose, steadying herself on the back of the chair in which she had been seated.

“Conquest saw what I didn’t—­till it was too late.”

He was on his feet now, facing her, with the chair between them.

“I wish you wouldn’t say any more,” she begged, though without overemphasis of pleading.  She was anxious, for her own sake as well as for his, to keep to the tone of the colloquial.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t.  I’m not going to say anything to shock you.  I know you’re going to marry Conquest.  You told me so before I went away, and——­”

“I should like to remind you that Mr. Conquest is the best friend you have.  When you hear what he’s done for you, you will see that you owe him more than you do any man in the world.”

“I know that.  I’m the last to forget it.  But it can’t do any harm to tell the woman—­who’s going to be his wife—­that I owe her even more than I do him.”

“It can’t do any harm, perhaps; but when I ask you not to——­”

“I can’t obey you.  I shouldn’t be a man if I went through life without some expression of my—­gratitude; and now’s the only time to make it.  There are things which I wasn’t free to say before, because I was bound to Evie—­and which it will soon be too late for you to listen to, because you’ll be bound to him.  You’re not bound to him yet——­”