For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour. The boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which there was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation. It produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question - this was the first glimpse of it - destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his intercourse with his little companion. Later, when he found himself talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as much as he liked, but must never abuse his parents. To this Morgan had the easy retort that he hadn’t dreamed of abusing them; which appeared to be true: it put Pemberton in the wrong.

“Then why am I a humbug for saying I think them charming?” the young man asked, conscious of a certain rashness.

“Well - they’re not your parents.”

“They love you better than anything in the world - never forget that,” said Pemberton.

“Is that why you like them so much?”

“They’re very kind to me,” Pemberton replied evasively.

“You ARE a humbug!” laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his tutor’s. He leaned against him looking oft at the sea again and swinging his long thin legs.

“Don’t kick my shins,” said Pemberton while he reflected “Hang it, I can’t complain of them to the child!”

“There’s another reason, too,” Morgan went on, keeping his legs still.

“Another reason for what?”

“Besides their not being your parents.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Pemberton.

“Well, you will before long. All right!”

He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with himself before he confessed it. He thought it the oddest thing to have a struggle with the child about. He wondered he didn’t hate the hope of the Moreens for bringing the struggle on. But by the time it began any such sentiment for that scion was closed to him. Morgan was a special case, and to know him was to accept him on his own odd terms. Pemberton had spent his aversion to special cases before arriving at knowledge. When at last he did arrive his quandary was great. Against every interest he had attached himself. They would have to meet things together. Before they went home that evening at Nice the boy had said, clinging to his arm:

“Well, at any rate you’ll hang on to the last.”

“To the last?”

“Till you’re fairly beaten.”

“YOU ought to be fairly beaten!” cried the young man, drawing him closer.

CHAPTER IV

A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly gave up the villa at Nice. Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little tours - one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end of ten days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back in mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice “for ever,” as they said; but this didn’t prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy May night, into a second-class railway-carriage - you could never tell by which class they would travel - where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful collection of bundles and bags. The explanation of this manoeuvre was that they had determined to spend the summer “in some bracing place”; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment - a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful - and passed the next four months in blank indigence.

The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and his pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame, the Conciergerie and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative rambles. They learned to know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back another year for a longer stay, the general character of which in Pemberton’s memory to-day mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first. He sees Morgan’s shabby knickerbockers - the everlasting pair that didn’t match his blouse and that as he grew longer could only grow faded. He remembers the particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.

Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was absolutely necessary - partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher. “My dear fellow, you ARE coming to pieces,” Pemberton would say to him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply, looking at him serenely up and down: “My dear fellow, so are you! I don’t want to cast you in the shade.” Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this - the assertion so closely represented the fact. If however the deficiencies of his own wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn’t like his little charge to look too poor. Later he used to say “Well, if we’re poor, why, after all, shouldn’t we look it?” and he consoled himself with thinking there was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan’s disrepair - it differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and spoils his things. He could trace perfectly the degrees by which, in proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs. Moreen shrewdly forbore to renew his garments. She did nothing that didn’t show, neglected him because he escaped notice, and then, as he illustrated this clever policy, discouraged at home his public appearances. Her position was logical enough - those members of her family who did show had to be showy.

During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of how he and his comrade might strike people; wandering languidly through the Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go, sitting on the winter days in the galleries of the Louvre, so splendidly ironical to the homeless, as if for the advantage of the calorifere. They joked about it sometimes: it was the sort of joke that was perfectly within the boy’s compass. They figured themselves as part of the vast vague hand-to-mouth multitude of the enormous city and pretended they were proud of their position in it - it showed them “such a lot of life” and made them conscious of a democratic brotherhood. If Pemberton couldn’t feel a sympathy in destitution with his small companion - for after all Morgan’s fond parents would never have let him really suffer - the boy would at least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing. He used sometimes to wonder what people would think they were - to fancy they were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping. Morgan wouldn’t be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor - he wasn’t smart enough; though he might pass for his companion’s sickly little brother. Now and then he had a five-franc piece, and except once, when they bought a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they laid it out scientifically in old books. This was sure to be a great day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that garnish the parapets. Such occasions helped them to live, for their books ran low very soon after the beginning of their acquaintance. Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow to give him something for them.

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