Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/152

144 sure? Beautiful old Peter!' But Lance at last produced it. 'Why, hang it, the truth about the Master.'

It made between them, for some minutes, a lively passage, full of wonder, for each, at the wonder of the other. 'Then how long have you understood'

'The true value of his work? I understood it,' Lance recalled, 'as soon as I began to understand anything. But I didn't begin fully to do that, I admit, till I got là-bas.'

'Dear, dear!'—Peter gasped with retrospective dread.

'But for what have you taken me? I'm a hopeless muff—that I had to have rubbed in. But I'm not such a muff as the Master!' Lance declared.

'Then why did you never tell me?'

'That I hadn't, after all'—the boy took him up—'remained such an idiot? Just because I never dreamed you knew. But I beg your pardon. I only wanted to spare you. And what I don't now understand is how the deuce then, for so long, you've managed to keep bottled.'

Peter produced his explanation, but only after some delay and with a gravity not void of embarrassment. 'It was for your mother.'

'Oh!' said Lance.

'And that's the great thing now—since the murder is out. I want a promise from you. I mean'—and Peter almost feverishly followed it up—'a vow from you, solemn and such as you owe me, here on the spot, that you'll sacrifice anything rather than let her ever guess'

'That I've guessed?'—Lance took it in. 'I see.' He evidently, after a moment, had taken in much. 'But what is it you have in mind that I may have a chance to sacrifice?'

'Oh, one has always something.'

Lance looked at him hard. 'Do you mean that you've had?' The look he received back, however, so put the question by that he found soon enough another. 'Are you really sure my mother doesn't know?'