Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/198

THE IVORY TOWER misrepresent her. But we're all"—he hastened to patch it up—"unspeakably corrupt."

"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she judiciously threw off.

"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"

"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an innocence!"

"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"

"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him," she said, "that he doesn't know."

"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are—to be so right?"

"Know more on every subject than all of us put together!" she called back at him as she now hurried off to dress.

 IV

, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's, walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; 184