“Have I? I don’t think I have.”

“At any rate, you have some subject of interest there which used not to be there?”

“I really can’t say,” replied Eugene, shaking his head blankly, after pausing again to reconsider. “At times I have thought yes; at other times I have thought no. Now, I have been inclined to pursue such a subject; now I have felt that it was absurd, and that it tired and embarrassed me. Absolutely, I can’t say. Frankly and faithfully, I would if I could.”

So replying, he clapped a hand, in his turn, on his friend’s shoulder, as he rose from his seat upon the bed, and said:

“You must take your friend as he is. You know what I am, my dear Mortimer. You know how dreadfully susceptible I am to boredom. You know that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum, I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant. You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more. Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered? The old nursery form runs, ‘Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree, p’raps you can’t tell me what this may be?’ My reply runs, ‘No. Upon my life, I can’t.’ ”

So much of what was fantastically true to his own knowledge of this utterly careless Eugene, mingled with the answer, that Mortimer could not receive it as a mere evasion. Besides, it was given with an engaging air of openness, and of special exemption of the one friend he valued, from his reckless indifference.

“Come, dear boy!” said Eugene. “Let us try the effect of smoking. If it enlightens me at all on this question, I will impart unreservedly.”

They returned to the room they had come from, and, finding it heated, opened a window. Having lighted their cigars, they leaned out of this window, smoking, and looking down at the moonlight, as it shone into the court below.

“No enlightenment,” resumed Eugene, after certain minutes of silence. “I feel sincerely apologetic, my dear Mortimer, but nothing comes.”

“If nothing comes,” returned Mortimer, “nothing can come from it. So I shall hope that this may hold good throughout, and that there may be nothing on foot. Nothing injurious to you, Eugene, or—”

Eugene stayed him for a moment with his hand on his arm, while he took a piece of earth from an old flowerpot on the window-sill and dexterously shot it at a little point of light opposite; having done which to his satisfaction, he said, “Or?”

“Or injurious to any one else.”

“How,” said Eugene, taking another little piece of earth, and shooting it with great precision at the former mark, “how injurious to any one else?”

“I don’t know.”

“And,” said Eugene, taking, as he said the word, another shot, “to whom else?”

“I don’t know.”

Checking himself with another piece of earth in his hand, Eugene looked at his friend inquiringly and a little suspiciously. There was no concealed or half-expressed meaning in his face.

“Two belated wanderers in the mazes of the law,” said Eugene, attracted by the sound of footsteps, and glancing down as he spoke, “stray into the court. They examine the door-posts of number one, seeking