"'Do you like them yourself, Mr. Armstrong?'

"Here was a floorer! Did I like them myself?--I really couldn't honestly
say I did. I was not greatly interested in them, further than as they
were my own, and my best attempts to say something about something I
knew nothing about. I was silent. She stood looking at me out of clear
grey eyes.

"'Now you have begun this conversation, Mr. Armstrong, I will go on with
it,' she said, at length. 'It was not of my seeking.--I do not think you
believe what you say in the pulpit.'

"Not believe what I said! Did I believe what I said? Or did I only
believe that it was to be believed? The tables were turned with a
vengeance. Here was the lay lamb, attacked and about to be worried by
the wolf clerical, turning and driving the said wolf to bay. I stood and
felt like a convicted criminal before the grey eyes of my judge. And
somehow or other I did not hate those clear pools of light. They were
very beautiful. But not one word could I find to say for myself. I stood
and looked at her, and I fear I began to twitch at my neck cloth, with a
vague instinct that I had better go and hang myself. I stared and
stared, and no doubt got as red as a turkey-cock--till it began to be
very embarrassing indeed. What refuge could there be from one who spoke
the truth so plainly? And how do you think I got out of it?" asked Mr.
Armstrong of me, John Smith, who, as he told the story, felt almost in
as great confusion and misery as the narrator must have been in at that
time, although now he looked amazingly jolly, and breathed away at his
cigar with the slow exhalations of an epicure.

"Mortal cannot tell," I answered.