"No; it is generally some one else's."

"I don't think much of people's passions myself. He might have something

far worse than that."

"Most undoubtedly. He might have atrocious taste in dress, or a tendency

to drink."

"Don't be silly. Did you know him when he was young? I don't mean to say

he isn't young--thirty-seven's young enough for anybody--I mean when he

was young like me?"

"I can't say. I doubt if he was ever young--like you. But I knew him when

he was a boy."

"So you understand him?"

"Oh, pretty well. Not always, perhaps. He's a difficult subject."

"Anyhow, you like him? Don't you?"

Stanistreet gave a curious hard laugh.

"Oh yes--I like him."

"That's all right. And really, I don't wonder that people can't make him

out. He's the strangest animal I ever met in my life. I haven't made

him out yet. I think I shall give him up."

"Give him up, by all means. Isn't that what people generally do when they

can't understand each other?"

Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking

came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and

probing into a man's past--"

Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was

sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to

have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some

familiar spirit. "And yet I wish--no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must

have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on

Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had

never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you

think of that? Must you be one or the other?"

Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us

sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."

"I wonder. He isn't a fool."

Stanistreet wondered too. He wondered at the things she allowed herself

to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all,

he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.

In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was

waving her muff wildly in the air. "Look--there he goes! Oh, did you

see him take that fence? What an insane thing to do with the ground

like that."

He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding

far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.

"By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy's guns at the head of

a line of cavalry."




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