I knew what a hopeless question that is to answer about almost any two persons!

He said rather helplessly, “Well, but hang it all! What have you in common with——”

Here I felt, suspended between us in the dusk like a Mahomet’s coffin, the name of Sydney Vandeleur!

But the Governor changed his mind about uttering it.

He said:

“For instance, what can you have in common with a man like Montresor? You’re twenty-one. He’s what?—Fifty? Sixty? Yet you can talk—you can——You seem to get on all right with him.”

“Naturally!” I said.

The Governor said nothing.

He put up a hand and leaned against a bough of the copper-beech under which we were standing.