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“Well–to understand.”

“To understand how he could swindle you?”

“Well,” Mark kept on, “to try and make out with him how, after such things–!” But he stopped; he couldn’t name them.

It was as if his companion knew. “Such things as you’ve done for him of course–such services as you’ve rendered him.”

“Ah, from far back. If I could tell you,” our friend vainly wailed–“if I could tell you!”

Newton Winch patted his shoulder. “Tell me–tell me!”

“The sort of relation, I mean; ever so many things of a kind–!” Again, however, he pulled up; he felt the tremor of his voice.

“Tell me, tell me,” Winch repeated with the same movement.

The tone in it now made their eyes meet again, and with this presentation of the altered face Mark measured as not before, for some reason, the extent of the recent ravage. “You must have been ill indeed.”

“Pretty bad. But I’m better. And you do me good”–with which the light of convalescence came back.

“I don’t awfully bore you?”

Winch shook his head. “You keep me up–and you see how no one else comes near me.”

Mark’s eyes made out that he was better–though it wasn’t yet that nothing was the matter with him. If there was ever a man with whom there was still something the matter–! Yet one couldn’t insist on that, and meanwhile he clearly did want company. “Then there we are. I myself had no one to go to.”

“You save my life,” Newton renewedly grinned.

VII

“Well, it’s your own fault,” Mark replied to that, “if you make me take advantage of you.” Winch had withdrawn his hand, which was back, violently shaking keys or money, in his trousers pocket; and in this position he had abruptly a pause, a sensible, absence, that might have represented either some odd drop of attention, some turn-off to another thought, or just simply the sudden act of listening. His guest had indeed himself–under suggestion–the impression of a sound. “Mayn’t you perhaps–if you hear something–have a call?”

Mark had said it so lightly, however, that he was the more struck with his host’s appearing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now was listening. “You hear something?”

“I thought you did.” Winch himself, on Mark’s own pressure of the outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment–an indication then, it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants’, or attendants’, or even trained nurses’ holidays. It had also marked the stage of his convalescence, and to that extent–after his first flush of surprise–had but smoothed Monteith’s way. At present he barely gave further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse, he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless turn–only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend’s just-uttered deprecation of the danger of boring him. “If I make you take advantage of me–that is blessedly talk to me–it’s exactly what I want to do. Talk to me–talk to me!” He positively waved it on; pulling up again, however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: “Hadn’t you better sit down?”

Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn’t but excuse himself. “Thanks–I’m very well so. I think of things and I fidget.”

Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. “Are you very sure?”

“Quite–I’m all right if you don’t mind.”

“Then as you like!” With which, shaking to extravagance again his long legs, Newton had swung off–only with a movement that, now his back was turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of his rather unnatural manner. He was curiously different with his back turned, as Mark now for the first time saw it–dangling and somewhat wavering, as from an excess of uncertainty of gait; and this impression was so strange, it created in our friend, uneasily and on the spot, such a need of explanation, that his speech was stayed long enough to give Winch time to turn round again. The latter had indeed by this moment reached one of the limits of the place, the wide studio bay, where he paused, his back to the light and his face afresh presented, to let his just passingly depressed and quickened eyes take in as much as possible of the large floor, range over it with such brief freedom of search as the disposition of the furniture permitted. He was looking for something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant. Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration, found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what it meant was connected with his entertainer’s slightly marked appeal to him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide space with a new consciousness.