THE PAPERS
"What do you call 'Larks'?"
"Oh, I remember. Well, it was because I saw larks coming; because I saw, I mean, what has happened. I was sure it would have to happen."
"And what the mischief is it?"
Bight smiled. "Why, what I tell you. That he has gone."
"Gone where?"
"Simply bolted to parts unknown. 'Where' is what nobody who belongs to him is able in the least to say, or seems likely to be able."
"Any more than why?"
"Any more than why."
"Only you are able to say that?"
"Well," said Bight, "I can say what has so lately stared me in the face, what he has been thrusting at me in all its grotesqueness: his desire for a greater privacy worked through the Papers themselves. He came to me with it," the young man presently added. "I didn't go to him."
"And he trusted you," Maud replied.
"Well, you see what I have given him—the very flower of my genius. What more do you want? I'm spent, seedy, sore. I'm sick," Bight declared, "of his beastly funk."
Maud's eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. "Is he thoroughly sincere?"
"Good God, no! How can he be? Only trying it—as a cat, for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops straight back."
"Then isn't his funk real?"
"As real as he himself is."
Maud wondered. "Isn't his flight———?"
"That's what we shall see!"
"Isn't," she continued, "his reason?"
"Ah," he laughed out, "there you are again!"
But she had another thought and was not discouraged. "Mayn't he be, honestly, mad?"
361
