Page:Across the Zodiac (Volume 2).djvu/172

 show. If you will not read it, please follow my hand as I read, and see for yourself how far I have misused your trust."

"I never doubted your good faith, Eunane" But she had begun to read, pointing with her finger as she went on. At one sentence hand and voice wavered a little without apparent reason. "I shall," wrote her school-friend, some half year her junior, "make my appearance at the next inspection. I wish the Camptâ, had left you here till now; we might perhaps have contrived to pass into the same household."

"A very innocent wish, and very natural," I said, in answer to the look, half inquiring, half shy, with which Eunane watched the effect of her words. I could not now use the precaution in her case, which it had somehow seemed natural to adopt with Eivé, of marking the paper returned for erasure. On her part, Eunane thrust into my hand the whole bundle as they were, and I was forced myself to erase, by an electro-chemical process which leaves no trace of writing, the words of that selected. The absence of any mark on the second paper served sufficiently to distinguish the two when, of course without stating from whom I received them, I placed, them in Davilo's hands.

When we were ready to leave the peristyle for the carriage, I observed that Eunane alone was still unveiled, while the others wore their cloaks of down and the thick veils, without which no lady may present herself to the public eye.

Thieving time is woman's crime, I said, quoting a domestic proverb. "In another household you would; be left behind."