“That is a jest!" says the professor haughtily.  This unusual tone from the professor strikes surprise to the soul of Hardinge.  He looks at him.  But the professor’s new humor is short-lived.  He sinks upon a chair in a tired sort of way, letting his arms fall over the sides of it.  As a type of utter despair he is a distinguished specimen.

“Why don’t you take her home again, back to the old aunt?” says Hardinge, moved by his misery.

“I can’t.  She tells me it would be useless, that the house is locked up, and—­and besides, Hardinge, her aunt—­after this, you know—­ would be——­”

“Naturally,” says Hardinge, after which he falls back upon his cigar.  “Light your pipe,” says he, “and we’ll think it over.”  The professor lights it, and both men draw nearer to each other.

“I’m afraid she won’t go back to her aunt any way,” says the professor, as a beginning to the “thinking it over.”  He pushes his glasses up to his forehead, and finally discards them altogether, flinging them on the table near.

“If she saw you now she might understand,” says Hardinge—­for, indeed, the professor without his glasses loses thirty per cent. of old Time.

“She wouldn’t,” says the professor.  “And never mind that.  Come back to the question.  I say she will never go back to her aunt.”

He looks anxiously at Hardinge.  One can see that he would part with a good deal of honest coin of the realm, if his companion would only not agree with him.

“It looks like it,” said Hardinge, who is rather enjoying himself.  “By Jove! what a thing to happen to you, Curzon, of all men in the world.  What are you going to do, eh?”

“It isn’t so much that,” says the professor faintly.  “It is what is she going to do?”

"Next!" supplements Hardinge.  “Quite so!  It would be a clever fellow who would answer that, straight off.  I say, Curzon, what a pretty girl she is, though.  Pretty isn’t the word.  Lovely, I——­”

The professor gets up suddenly.

“Not that,” says he, raising his hand in his gentle fashion—­that has now something of haste in it.  “It—­I—­you know what I mean, Hardinge.  To discuss her—­herself, I mean—­and here——­”

“Yes.  You are right,” says Hardinge slowly, with, however, an irrepressible stare at the professor.  It is a prolonged stare.  He is very fond of Curzon, though knowing absolutely nothing about him beyond the fact that he is eminently likeable; and it now strikes him as strange that this silent, awkward, ill-dressed, clever man should be the one to teach him how to behave himself.  Who is Curzon?  Given a better tailor, and a worse brain, he might be a reasonable-looking fellow enough, and not so old either—­forty, perhaps—­perhaps less.  “Have you no relation to whom you could send her?” he says at length, that sudden curiosity as to who Curzon may be prompting the question.  “Some old lady?  An aunt, for example?”