think I must either be very clever or else very disagreeable."
"I should not call you clever," said Robert Allitsen grimly.
"No," answered Bernardine pensively. "But I always did think myself
clever until I came here. Now I am beginning to know better. But it
is rather a shock, isn't it?"
"I have never experienced the shock," he said.
"Then you still think you are clever?" she asked.
"There is only one man my intellectual equal in Petershof, and he is
not here any more," he said gravely. "Now I come to remember, he died.
That is the worst of making friendships here; people die."
"Still, it is something to be left king of the intellectual world,"
said Bernardine. "I never thought of you in that light."
There was a sly smile about, her lips as she spoke, and there was the
ghost of a smile on the Disagreeable Man's face.
"Why do you talk with that horrid Swede?" he said suddenly. "He is a
wretched low foreigner. Have you heard some of his views?"
"Some of them," answered Bernardine cheerfully. "One of his views is
really amusing: that it is very rude of you to read the newspaper during
meal-time; and he asks if it is an English custom. I tell him it depends
entirely on the Englishman, and the Englishman's neighbour!"
So she too had her raps at him, but always in the kindest way.
He had a curious effect on her. His very bitterness seemed to check in
its growth her own bitterness. The cup of poison of which he himself had
drunk deep, he passed on to her. She drank of it, and it did not poison
her. She was morbid, and she needed cheerful companionship. His dismal
companionship and his hard way of looking at life ought by rights to
have oppressed her. Instead of which she became less sorrowful.
Was the Disagreeable Man, perhaps, a reader of character? Did he know
how to help her in his own grim gruff way? He himself had suffered so
much; perhaps he did know.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE STORY MOVES ON AT LAST.
BERNARDINE was playing chess one day with the Swedish Professor. On the
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