dinner-hour coming from the Botanical Gardens. It's fate that brings you to this house. And it's fate that sets you and me here at this minute playing chess."
"If you call it playing chess," laughed Somers.
Jack looked down at the board.
"I'm blest if I know whose move it is," he said. "But never mind. I say that fate meant you and Mrs Somers to come here: her as much as you. I say fate meant me and you and Victoria and her to mean a lot to one another. And when I feel my fate, I absolutely give myself up to it. That's what I say. Do you think I'm right."
His hand, which held Somers' arm lightly, now gripped the biceps of that arm hard, while he looked into the other man's face.
"I should say so," said Somers, rather uncomfortably.
Jack hardly heeded the words. He was watching the face.
"You're a stranger here. You're from the old country. You're different from us. But you're a man we want, and you're a man we've got to keep. I know it. What? What do you say? I can't trust you, can't I?"
"What with?" asked Somers.
"What with?" Jack hesitated. "Why everything!" he blurted. "Everything! Body and soul and money and every blessed thing. I can trust you with everything! Isn't that right?"
Somers looked with troubled eyes into the dark, dilated, glowing eyes of the other man.
"But I don't know what it means," he stammered. "Everything! It means so much, that it means nothing."
Jack nodded his head slowly.
"Oh yes it does," he reiterated. "Oh yes it does."
"Besides," said Somers, "why should you trust me with anything, let alone everything. You've no occasion to trust me at all—except—except as one neighbour trusts another, in common honour."
"Common honour!" Jack just caught up the words, not heeding the sense. "It's more than common honour. It's most uncommon honour. But look here," he seemed to rouse himself. "Supposing I came to you, to ask you things, and tell you things, you'd answer me man to man, wouldn't you?—with common honour? You'd treat
