Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/234

222 "Yes—of course. But how much?"

"Then don't you really know?" Cornelia asked. He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. "Do you, my dear?"

She waited a little. "If you haven't really put it to her I don't suppose she knows."

This at last arrested him again. "My dear Cornelia, she doesn't know—!"

He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. "The more reason then to help her to find it out."

"I mean," he explained, "that she doesn't know anything."

"Anything?"

"Anything else, I mean—even if she does know that.'

Cornelia considered of it. "But what else need she—in particular—know? Isn't that the principal thing?"

"Well"—and he resumed his circuit—"she doesn't know anything that we know. But nothing," he re-emphasized—"nothing whatever!"

"Well, can't she do without that?"

"Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!"

He had paused once more with his point but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. "Surely if you know for yourself—!"

"Ah, it doesn't seem enough for me to know for