Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/240

 "With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to say also that he was—definitely, yes—more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really!" But he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!"

"And haven't I admitted that?"

"I'll be hanged if you don't know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced.

He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn."

"You mean that what she has proposed is to tell you?"

His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner—the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course, at the same time, but a few 234