lived, he would have given more striking and, it is to be hoped,
more fruitful examples. He at least was, in Vereker's words, a
little demon of subtlety. We had begun by disputing, but I soon
saw that without my stirring a finger his infatuation would have
its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents as I had done--
he would clap his hands over new lights and see them blown out by
the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told him, but
the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic
character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had
Shakespeare's own word for his being cryptic he would at once have
accepted it. The case there was altogether different--we had
nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks. I returned that I was
stupefied to see him attach such importance even to the word of Mr.
Vereker. He wanted thereupon to know if I treated Mr. Vereker's
word as a lie. I wasn't perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound,
to go so far as that, but I insisted that till the contrary was
proved I should view it as too fond an imagination. I didn't, I
confess, say--I didn't at that time quite know--all I felt. Deep
down, as Miss Erme would have said, I was uneasy, I was expectant.
At the core of my disconcerted state--for my wonted curiosity lived
in its ashes--was the sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at
last probably come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his
credulity, a great point of the fact that from of old, in his study
of this genius, he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn't know
what, faint wandering notes of a hidden music. That was just the
rarity, that was the charm: it fitted so perfectly into what I
reported.

If I returned on several occasions to the little house in Chelsea I
dare say it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss