“I’m bound to say high spirits don’t show in your face,” Peter was rather ruefully forced to confess. “Still, are you very sure you do know?”

“Well, I at least know as much as I can bear.” These remarks were exchanged in Peter’s den, and the young man, smoking cigarettes, stood before the fire with his back against the mantel. Something of his bloom seemed really to have left him.

Poor Peter wondered. “You’re clear then as to what in particular I wanted you not to go for?”

“In particular?” Lance thought. “It seems to me that, in particular, there can have been but one thing.”

They stood for a little sounding each other. “Are you quite sure?”

“Quite sure I’m a beastly duffer? Quite—by this time.”

“Oh!”—and Peter turned away as if almost with relief.

“It’s that that isn’t pleasant to find out.”

“Oh, I don’t care for ‘that,’ ” said Peter, presently coming round again. “I mean I personally don’t.”

“Yet I hope you can understand a little that I myself should!”

“Well, what do you mean by it?” Peter sceptically asked.

And on this Lance had to explain—how the upshot of his studies in Paris had inexorably proved a mere deep doubt of his means. These studies had waked him up, and a new light was in his eyes; but what the new light did was really to show him too much. “Do you know what’s the matter with me? I’m too horribly intelligent. Paris was really the last place for me. I’ve learnt what I can’t do.”

Poor Peter stared—it was a staggerer; but even after they had had, on the subject, a longish talk in which the boy brought out to the full the hard truth of his lesson, his friend betrayed less pleasure than usually breaks into a face to the happy tune of “I told you so!” Poor Peter himself made now indeed so little a point of having told him so that Lance broke ground in a different place a day or two after. “What was it then that—before I went—you were afraid I should find out?” This, however, Peter refused to tell him, on the ground that if he hadn’t yet guessed perhaps he never would, and that nothing at all, for either of them, in any case, was to be gained by giving the thing a name. Lance eyed him, on this, an instant, with the bold curiosity of youth—with the air indeed of having in his mind two or three names, of which one or other would be right. Peter, nevertheless, turning his back again, offered no encouragement, and when they parted afresh it was with some show of impatience on the side of the boy. Accordingly, at their next encounter, Peter saw at a glance that he had now, in the interval, divined and that, to sound his note, he was only waiting till they should find themselves alone. This he had soon arranged, and he then broke straight out. “Do you know your conundrum has been keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came over me—so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been supposing I had to go to Paris to learn that?” Even now, to see him still so sublimely on his guard, Peter’s young friend had to laugh afresh. “You won’t give a sign till you’re sure? Beautiful old Peter!” But Lance at last produced it. “Why, hang it, the truth about the Master.”

It made between them, for some minutes, a lively passage, full of wonder, for each, at the wonder of the other. “Then how long have you understood—”

“The true value of his work? I understood it,” Lance recalled, “as soon as I began to understand anything. But I didn’t begin fully to do that, I admit, till I got là-bas.”

“Dear, dear!” —Peter gasped with retrospective dread.