repeated what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh of course he's
very clever!" And with this she got up; our two absentees had
reappeared.



CHAPTER II



Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few
words with her husband that I didn't hear and that ended in her
taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house.
Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit
conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him
he would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments
of my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to
have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out
the signs of things mastered only afterwards. This later knowledge
throws a backward light and makes me forget that, at least on the
occasion of my present reference--I mean that first afternoon--Mark
Ambient struck me as only enviable. Allowing for this he must yet
have failed of much expression as we walked back to the house, though
I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small
son.

"That's an extraordinary little boy of yours. I've never seen such a
child."

"Why," he asked while we went, "do you call him extraordinary?"