Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house. He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter—" he began. He began, but there he left it. "A bibelot the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness—and with a quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness. Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get off with them?"!

"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?" "Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and that it was near at hand."

"You'll last quite as long—" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated. "It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent." "Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.