Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/131

 "You're perfectly free to ask her. I wonder even that you haven't done so yet."

"Well," he said with the finest stroke of unconsciousness he had yet shown me—"well, I suppose it's because I'm afraid of her."

"But not too much afraid," I risked suggesting, "to be hoping at this moment that you'll find her if you go back to where most of our party is gathered. You're not going for tea—you're going for Mrs. Server: just of whom it was, as I say, you were thinking while you sat there with Lady John. So what is it you so greatly fear?"

It was as if I could see through his dim face a sort of gratitude for my making all this out to him. "I don't know that it's anything that she may do to me." He could make it out in a manner for himself. "It's as if something might happen to her. It's what I told you—that she may break down. If you ask me how, or in what," he continued, "how can I tell you? In whatever it is that she's trying to do. I don't understand it." Then he wound up with a sigh that, in spite of its softness, he imperfectly stifled. "But it's something or other!"

"What would it be, then," I asked, "but what you speak of as what I've 'found out'? The effort you distinguish in her is the effort of concealment—vain, as I gather it strikes you both, so far as I, in my supernatural acuteness, am concerned." 125