Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/81

Rh yourself with information at second-hand. Ask me what you like. I'll tell you everything."

Her companion considered. "You might then begin by telling me what I've already asked."

She took him up before he could go on. "Oh, why I attached an importance to his hearing what I just now said? Yes, yes; you shall have it." She turned it over as if with the sole thought of giving it to him with the utmost lucidity; then she was visibly struck with the help she should derive from knowing just one thing more. "But first—are you at all jealous of him?"

Dennis Vidal broke into a laugh which might have been a tribute to her rare audacity, yet which somehow, at the same time, made him seem only more serious. "That's a thing for you to find out for yourself!"

"I see—I see." She looked at him with musing, indulgent eyes. "It would be too wonderful. Yet otherwise, after all, why should you care?"

"I don't mind telling you frankly," said Dennis, while, with two fingers softly playing upon her lower lip, she sat estimating the possibility she had named—"I don't mind telling you frankly that I