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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 la-bas.’

‘Dear, dear!’–Peter gasped with retrospective dread.

‘But for what have you taken me? I’m a hopeless muff–that I had to have rubbed in. But I’m not such a muff as the Master!’ Lance declared.

‘Then why did you never tell me–?’

‘That I hadn’t, after all’–the boy took him up–‘remained such an idiot? Just because I never dreamed you knew. But I beg your pardon. I only wanted to spare you. And what I don’t now understand is how the deuce then for so long you’ve managed to keep bottled.’

Peter produced his explanation, but only after some delay and with a gravity not void of embarrassment. ‘It was for your mother.’

‘Oh!’ said Lance.

‘And that’s the great thing now–since the murder is out. I want a promise from you. I mean’–and Peter almost feverishly followed it up–‘a vow from you, solemn and such as you owe me here on the spot, that you’ll sacrifice anything rather than let her ever guess–‘

‘That I’ve guessed?’–Lance took it in. ‘I see.’ He evidently after a moment had taken in much. ‘But what is it you’ve in mind that I may have a chance to sacrifice?’

‘Oh one has always something.’

Lance looked at him hard. ‘Do you mean that you’ve had–?’ The look he received back, however, so put the question by that he found soon enough another. ‘Are you really sure my mother doesn’t know?’

Peter, after renewed reflexion, was really sure. ‘If she does she’s too wonderful.’

‘But aren’t we all too wonderful?’

‘Yes,’ Peter granted–‘but in different ways. The thing’s so desperately important because your father’s little public consists only, as you know then,’ Peter developed–‘well, of how many?’

‘First of all,’ the Master’s son risked, ‘of himself. And last of all too. I don’t quite see of whom else.’

Peter had an approach to impatience. ‘Of your mother, I say–always.’

Lance cast it all up. ‘You absolutely feel that?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well then with yourself that makes three.’

‘Oh me!’–and Peter, with a wag of his kind old head, modestly excused himself. The number’s at any rate small enough for any individual dropping out to be too dreadfully missed. Therefore, to put it in a nutshell, take care, my boy–that’s all–that you’re not!’

‘I’ve got to keep on humbugging?’ Lance wailed.

‘It’s just to warn you of the danger of your failing of that that I’ve seized this opportunity.’

‘And what do you regard in particular,’ the young man asked, ‘as the danger?’

‘Why this certainty: that the moment your mother, who feels so strongly, should suspect your secret–well,’ said Peter desperately, ‘the fat would be on the fire.’

Lance for a moment seemed to stare at the blaze. ‘She’d throw me over?’

‘She’d throw him over.’

‘And come round to us?’

Peter, before he answered, turned away. ‘Come round to you.’ But he had said enough to indicate–and, as he evidently trusted, to avert–the horrid contingency.

IV

Within six months again, none the less, his fear was on more occasions than one all before him. Lance had returned to Paris for another trial; then had reappeared at home and had had, with his father, for the first time in his life, one of the scenes that strike sparks. He described it with much expression to Peter, touching whom (since they had never done so before) it was the sign of a new reserve on the part of the pair at Carrara Lodge that they at present failed, on a matter of intimate interest, to open themselves–if not in joy then in sorrow–to their good friend. This produced perhaps practically between the parties a shade of alienation and a slight intermission of commerce–marked mainly indeed by the fact that to talk at his ease with his old playmate Lance had in general to come to see him. The closest if not quite the gayest relation they had yet known together was thus ushered in. The difficulty for poor Lance was a tension at home–begotten by the fact that his father wished him to be at least the sort of success he himself had been. He hadn’t ‘chucked’ Paris–though nothing appeared more vivid to him than that Paris had chucked him: he would go back again because of the fascination in trying, in seeing, in sounding the depths–in learning one’s lesson, briefly, even if the lesson were simply that of one’s impotence in the presence of one’s larger vision. But what did the Master, all aloft in his senseless fluency, know of impotence, and what vision–to be called such–had he in all his blind life ever had? Lance, heated and indignant, frankly appealed to his godparent on this score.