Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/188

182 The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. 'What was there else about it?'

'Why, don't you know?'—Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. 'Of course I know that she would never let him alone.'

'How could she—fancy!—when he had so compromised her?'

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the younger pair of lips. 'Had he so?'

'Why, don't you know the scandal?'

Our heroine thought, recollected; there was something, whatever it was, that she knew, after all, much more of than Mrs. Jordan. She saw him again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegram—she saw him as she had seen him leave the shop. She perched herself a moment on this. 'Oh, there was nothing public.'

'Not exactly public—no. But there was an awful scare and an awful row. It was all on the