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RV 98 a little cloud before his face as he leaned forward. "What did she tell you?" he asked.

"The truth is, I don't believe she knows she's told me anything," Carron confessed. "In a manner of speaking, I got it out of her."

Rader knitted his forehead. This way of approaching the matter seemed scarcely to his fancy. "Better ask her straight," he said laconically.

"What she wants of it?"

"Yes, and whether she's seen it, too. Better have it all square from the first; let her know what you're after."

"Do you think she would tell me?"

"Lord knows," said the scholar, with a humorous eye; "I never do!"

"She told you." He was making assumptions as fast as he could find them, and every time Rader transformed them into facts.

"That is different. She tells me everything because I don't care. What would an old fellow like me care? She might just as well go whisper it to one of those stone heads on the mountain up yonder."

Carron restrained a smile at the scholar's idea of what a tight vessel he was for a secret. "She told Ferrier," he urged.

"Did she say that?"

"No; you did."