"'You're very young--fortunately," Morgan went on, turning to him again.

"Oh yes, compared with you!"

"Therefore it won't matter so much if you do lose a lot of time."

"That's the way to look at it," said Pemberton accommodatingly.

They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: "Do you like my
father and my mother very much?"

"Dear me, yes. They're charming people."

Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly, familiarly,
but at the same time affectionately, he remarked: "You're a jolly old
humbug!"

For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour. The
boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red
himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which there
was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon,
even tacitly, in such a relation. It produced for Pemberton an
embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question--this was the first
glimpse of it--destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to
the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his
intercourse with his little companion. Later, when he found himself
talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever
have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at
Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added
to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to