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Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.

At last she said slowly: “She came to find out if you were really free.”

Thursdale colored again. “Free?” he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at contact with such crassness.

“Yes–if I had quite done with you.” She smiled in recovered security. “It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.”

“Yes–well?” he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.

“Well–and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define my status–to know exactly where I had stood all along.”

Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue. “And even when you had told her that–“

“Even when I had told her that I had had no status–that I had never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant,” said Mrs. Vervain, slowly–“even then she wasn’t satisfied, it seems.”

He uttered an uneasy exclamation. “She didn’t believe you, you mean?”

“I mean that she did believe me: too thoroughly.”

“Well, then–in God’s name, what did she want?”

“Something more–those were the words she used.”

“Something more? Between–between you and me? Is it a conundrum?” He laughed awkwardly.

“Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes.”

“So it seems!” he commented. “But since, in this case, there wasn’t any–” he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

“That’s just it. The unpardonable offence has been–in our not offending.”

He flung himself down despairingly. “I give it up!–What did you tell her?” he burst out with sudden crudeness.

“The exact truth. If I had only known,” she broke off with a beseeching tenderness, “won’t you believe that I would still have lied for you?”

“Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?”

“To save you–to hide you from her to the last! As I’ve hidden you from myself all these years!” She stood up with a sudden tragic import in her movement. “You believe me capable of that, don’t you? If I had only guessed–but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring.”

“The truth that you and I had never–“

“Had never–never in all these years! Oh, she knew why–she measured us both in a flash. She didn’t suspect me of having haggled with you–her words pelted me like hail. ‘He just took what he wanted–sifted and sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of cinders. And you let him–you let yourself be cut in bits’–she mixed her metaphors a little–‘be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he’s Shylock–and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out of you.’ But she despises me the most, you know–far the most–” Mrs. Vervain ended.

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.

Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

His first words were characteristic. “She does despise me, then?” he exclaimed.

“She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the heart.”