“I am minding it as hard as I can,” said his sister, “and you ought to thank me for taking an interest in yours, too.  Don’t you like poor little Lady Eileen?”

“Very much; same way she likes me.  We’re good chums.”

“If you don’t believe what I say, Petro, there’s a splendid way of finding out.  Ask her.”

“See here, my dear girl, haven’t you got anything better to do this morning than to loll all over my sofa and talk drivel when I want to write a letter blowing up somebody?  I felt a fool when you came in.  Now you’ve made me feel a double-dyed idiot.  Kindly go away and dig a hole in the ground with yourself.”

Ena went.  But she felt that, despite discouragement, she had already dug a tiny, tiny hole in very hard ground, not for herself, but for a little seed which might perhaps send out its shoots later.

It did not precisely do that; but as the ground raked over was Petro’s heart, the seed his sister had left made him uncomfortable.  It burned and stung and felt alive, and something had to be done about it.

Of course Ena was wrong.  He was the last fellow in the world a girl could care for.  He had learned that to his sorrow.  A girl couldn’t even like him.  There was something about him that bored her nearly to death as soon as she began to know him fairly well, and made her want to bolt.  He was as sure, he told himself, of the exact nature of nice little Lady Eileen’s feeling for him as of his for her.  Nevertheless, that night at a dance, when he and she (for the best of reasons, they didn’t know how) were sitting out the tango, he found himself becoming confidential.

This was strange, for Petro had one of his father’s characteristics if no other—­he did not confide things in people.  Peter senior kept his own secrets because it was wise to keep them.  Peter junior kept his partly because he thought they would bore every one save himself.  So even where the two were alike, they were miles apart.  For some vague reason, however—­which, if he had stopped to define it, would have convinced him that he was disgustingly conceited—­Petro was moved that night, in a new-fashioned conservatory resembling a jungle, to tell Lady Eileen one or two things about himself.

How it started he was not quite sure, but with some awkwardness he had tried to lead up to the subject, and suddenly Eileen had begun to help him out.

“I used to think a man would have to know a lot about a girl,” he said, “before he could be sure she was the sort he could fall in love with.  I thought love at first sight wouldn’t be love at all, but only infatuation.  Now I see that I didn’t know what I was talking about.  It isn’t a question of whether you could love her.  You’ve just got to.  You can’t do anything else.  It’s like seven devils or seven angels entering into and possessing you.  There they are before you know what’s happened.  Afterward, when you find out what’s struck you, maybe it’s too late.  Or maybe there’d never have been any hope, anyhow.”