"'No, I cannot really, not yet anyway; perhaps some day!'
"I was so afraid of offending her that I moved back, puzzled and discomfited, when once again I was conscious she was thinking.
"'How foolish he is!--it would have been much nicer to have been forced to give him one; he is so strong he could easily have held me back in the chair and made me do it.'
"This came as a whip for my inclinations, and I did as suggested under a storm of protests which soon died down, for I now found her thoughts were wandering between the condition of her hair and the probability of some one coming in from the billiard-room.
"I think I have now described sufficiently our first moments of happiness, but I will own that before we were eventually disturbed I had begun to get not a little annoyed with my new power of perception, and began to wonder if after all we had arrived at a sufficient state of perfection to be always happily employed when using it.
"The next half-hour which I spent with Vera's father convinced me that often it might be useful in the cause of humility.
"I asked to speak with him alone, a request that he readily granted, though, if I interpreted his thoughts aright, he used strong language internally. I felt horribly nervous, and at first he did nothing to help me, but what was far worse, he kept on transmitting thoughts that made me every moment more wretched and uncomfortable; they must have been his, as I feel sure they would never otherwise have occurred to me as being likely to proceed from the smiling old gentleman sitting opposite. This is something of what I made out of them, but they were disjointed and confused, for you must remember I had not as yet had an opportunity of studying him as perfectly as his daughter.
"'Confound it! I wish he had not been in such a hurry. I must delay things in some way. I meant to make inquiries, but have been so busy. Besides there is ... coming, and I quite fancy that when he sees her, he ... But after all, Sydney is an only son; I did find that out, and I must not choke him off. I wonder how much longer he will stand there like a fool and say nothing!'
"You may well imagine that this kind of thing was hardly helpful to me. I began at once to wonder who my rival might be. And here I may as well mention that even now, when my thought-reading power has been developed very nearly to perfection, I can seldom read the name of a person passing through another's mind, unless that person is also known to me. This is probably owing to the fact that in thinking of an acquaintance we disregard usually the name and are conscious only of the individuality, for in the few cases when I have had a name conveyed distinctly, it has been where the person referred to was comparatively a stranger to the one whose thoughts I was studying.
"The silence was eventually broken by Mr. Soudin.