“All this past summer, you have been withholding something from me. Before we entered on our boating vacation, you were as bent upon it as I have seen you upon anything since we first rowed together. But you cared very little for it when it came, often found it a tie and a drag upon you, and were constantly away. Now it was well enough half-a-dozen times, a dozen times, twenty times, to say to me in your own odd manner, which I know so well and like so much, that your disappearances were precautions against our boring one another; but of course after a short while I began to know that they covered something. I don’t ask what it is, as you have not told me; but the fact is so. Say, is it not?”

“I give you my word of honour, Mortimer,” returned Eugene, after a serious pause of a few moments, “that I don’t know.”

“Don’t know, Eugene?”

“Upon my soul, don’t know. I know less about myself than about most people in the world, and I don’t know.”

“You have some design in your mind?”