There was a strange contradiction in it; there were in fact more contradictions than ever. I believed what Mrs. Pallant had told me about Linda, and yet that other idea made me ashamed of my nephew. I was sorry for the girl; I regretted her loss of a great chance, if loss it was to be; and yet I hoped that the manner in which her mother had betrayed her (there was no other word) to her lover had been thoroughgoing. It would need very radical measures on Mrs. Pallant's part to excuse Archie. For him too I was sorry, if she had made an impression on him—the impression she desired. Once or twice I was on the point of going in to condole with him, in my dressing-gown; I was sure he too had jumped up from his bed and was looking out of his window at the everlasting hills.
I am bound to say that he showed few symptoms when we met in the morning and breakfasted together. Youth is strange; it has resources that experience seems only to take away from us. One of these is simply (in the given case) to do nothing—to say nothing. As we grow older and cleverer we think that is too simple, too crude; we dissimulate more elaborately, but with an effect much less baffling. My young man looked not in the least as if he had lain awake or had something on his mind; and when I asked him what he had done after my premature departure (I explained this by saying I had been tired of waiting for him—I was weary with my journey and wanted to go to bed), he replied: 'Oh, nothing in particular. I hung about the place; I like it better than this. We had an awfully jolly time on the water. I wasn't in the least tired.' I did not worry him with questions; it seemed to me
