Page:The council of seven.djvu/18

 the quality or absence of quality in the electric light prevented his seeing it.

"Don't you think?"—in a gay whisper.

There was no escape. "One shrinks" Her will cut the phrase in two. To have completed it would have been to say too little or too much.

"Everybody's secret," he laughed.

As she felt the knife edge of the irony lurking in the situation, she gave a little gasp. There was only one thing for her now. She must harden her heart.

"I hadn't realized," she said, in her soft voice, a delicious blend of the Old World and the New, "that your speech to-day was going to be so important."

"Quite the last word for it," he said, lightly. "A heart-to-heart talk, don't you know, with a few friends and constituents. For some dark reason they insisted on giving me a lovely bit of old Sheffield plate—and a scroll. One mustn't forget the scroll. Perhaps the birds have been talking. Anyhow, the Chairman thought the salver would look very nice on the dining-room sideboard of a newly married couple!"

He waited for her laugh, but only one tiny segment of her mind was listening.

"It fills the entire placard of the Evening Press." She dare not look at him. There was a clutch at her heart.

"What! My jawbation! Shade of the sea serpent and the giant gooseberry!"

She felt the beat of her heart strike upwards. Her