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“Where?”

“I believe at the Overpark.”

Miss Hernshaw caught her breath, as if she were going to speak, but she did not say anything.

“Why do you insist upon all this, Miss Hernshaw?” he entreated. “It can do you no good to follow the matter up!”

“Do you think I want to do myself good?” she returned. “I want to do myself harm! What did he say when he came to see you?”

“Well, you can imagine,” said Hewson, not able to keep out of his tone the lingering disgust he felt for St. John.

“He complained?”

“He all but shed tears,” said Hewson, recalled to a humorous sense of St. John’s behavior. “I felt sorry for him; though,” he added, darkly, “I can’t say that I do now.”

Miss Hernshaw didn’t seek to fathom the mystery of his closing words. “Had he been actually inconvenienced by that thing in the paper?”

“Yes–somewhat.”

“How much?”

“Oh,” Hewson groaned. “If you must know–“

“I must! The worst!”

“It had fairly turned him out of house and home. His servants had all left him, and he had been reduced to taking his meals at the inn. He showed me a handful of letters from people whom he had asked to visit him, withdrawing their acceptances, or making excuses for not accepting.”

“Ah!” said Miss Hernshaw, with a deep, inward breath, as if this now were indeed something like the punishment she had expected. “And will it–did he think–did he say anything about the pecuniary effect–the–whether it would hurt the property?”

“He seemed to think it would,” answered Hewson, reluctantly, and he added, unfortunately for his generous purpose, “I really can’t enter upon that part.”

She arched her eyebrows in grieved surprise. “But that is the very part that I want you to enter upon Mr. Hewson. You must tell me, now! Did he say that it had injured the property very much?”

“He did, but–“

“But what?”

“I think St. John is a man to put the worst face on that matter.”

“You are saying that to keep me from feeling badly. But I ought to feel badly–I wish to feel badly. I suppose he said that it wasn’t worth anything now.”

“Something of that sort,” Hewson helplessly admitted.

“Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he chooses to ask!” With the precipitation which characterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose from the chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, pushed an electric button in the wall, swirled away to the other side of the room, unlocked the door behind which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it open, said, “You can come out, Mrs. Hock; I’ve rung for breakfast.”

Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague eyes wandering over every other object in the room, till they rested upon Hewson, directly before her. Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, as if taking him into the joke. “Well, has Rosalie had it out with you?”

“I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock,” Miss Hernshaw answered, “and I will tell you all about it later. Now I want my breakfast.”

XII.

Hewson ate the meal before him, and it was a very good one, as from time to time he noted, in a daze which was as strange a confusion of the two consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. Whatever the convention was between Miss Hernshaw and Mrs. Rock with regard to the matter in hand, or lately in hand, it dropped, after a few uninterested inquiries from Mrs. Rock, who was satisfied, or seemed so, to know that Miss Hernshaw had got at the worst. She led the talk to other things, like the comparative comforts and discomforts of the line to Genoa and the line to Liverpool; and Hewson met her upon these polite topics with an apparent fulness of interest that would have deceived a much more attentive listener.

All the time he was arguing with Miss Hernshaw in his nether consciousness, pleading with her to keep her away from the fact that he had himself bought St. Johnswort, until he could frame some fitting form in which to tell her that he had bought it. With his outward eyes, he saw her drooping on the opposite side of the table, and in spite of her declaration that she wanted her breakfast, making nothing of it, after the preliminary melon, while to his inward vision she was passionately refusing, by every charming perversity, to be tempted away from the subject.