tly conscious of the appearance she
thus conferred on Mrs. Jordan of knowing, in comparison with herself, so
tremendously much about it. Well, there were things she wanted so to get
at that she was willing at last, though it hurt her, to pay for them with
humiliation. "Why are they not his?"

"Don't you know, dear, that he has nothing?"

"Nothing?" It was hard to see him in such a light, but Mrs. Jordan's
power to answer for it had a superiority that began, on the spot, to
grow. "Isn't he rich?"

Mrs. Jordan looked immensely, looked both generally and particularly,
informed. "It depends upon what you call--! Not at any rate in the
least as she is. What does he bring? Think what she has. And then,
love, his debts."

"His debts?" His young friend was fairly betrayed into helpless
innocence. She could struggle a little, but she had to let herself go;
and if she had spoken frankly she would have said: "Do tell me, for I
don't know so much about him as _that_!" As she didn't speak frankly she
only said: "His debts are nothing--when she so adores him."

Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only
take it all. That was what it had come to: his having sat with her there
on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put his hand
on her, making her know what he would have said if permitted; his having
returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with supplicating eyes and a
fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and pedantic,
helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition, only answered
him, yet supplicating back, through the bars of the cage,--all simply
that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only through Mrs. Jordan,
who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him through Lady Bradeen.
"She adores him--but of course that wasn't all there was about it."

The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. "What was there
else about it?"

"Why, don't you know?"--Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a
suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. "Of course I know
she would never let him alone."

"How _could_ she--fancy!--when he had so compromised her?"

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the
younger pair of lips. "_Had_ he so--?"

"Why, don't you know the scandal?"

Our heroine thought, recollected there was something,