"That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me. But if nothing, in him, strikes you——!"
He met my eyes a moment—then glanced about. "Where is he?"
"Behind you; only don't turn round to look, for he knows——" But I dropped, having caught something directed toward me in Brissenden's face. My interlocutor remained blank, simply asking me, after an instant, what it was he knew. On this I said what I meant. "He knows we've noticed."
Long wondered again. "Ah, but I haven't!" He spoke with some sharpness.
"He knows," I continued, noting the sharpness too, "what's the matter with him."
"Then what the devil is it?"
I waited a little, having for the moment an idea on my hands. "Do you see him often?"
Long disengaged the ash from his cigarette. "No. Why should I?"
Distinctly, he was uneasy—though as yet perhaps but vaguely—at what I might be coming to. That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me. "Do you mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?"
On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard. "'Strikes' me—in that boy? Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life. He's not an object of the smallest interest to me!"