l seat.
Anne, not loosening her jacket, looked at him, her face pure and
appealing above the fur about her throat, as if to beg him to be as kind
as he possibly could, since it all involved Lydia.

"I've no doubt it's Madame Beattie," said Alston carelessly, even it
might have been a little amused at the possibilities. "If there's a
ferment anywhere north of Central America she's pretty certain to have
set it brewing."

Anne told him her tale succinctly, and his unconcern crumbled. He
frowned over the foolishness of it, and considered, while she talked,
whether he had better be quite open with her, or whether it was
sufficient to take the responsibility of the thing and settle it like a
swaggering god warranted to rule. That was better, he concluded.

"I'll go to see Madame Beattie," he said. "Then I'll report to you. But
you'd better not speak to Lydia about it. Or Jeff. Promise me."

"Oh, I'll promise," said Anne, a lovely rose flush on her face. "Only,
if Lydia is in danger you must tell me in time to do something. I don't
know what, but you know for Lydia I'd do anything."

"I will, too," said Alston. "Only it won't be for Lydia wholly. It'll be
for you."

Then for an instant, though so alive to her, he seemed to withdraw into
remote cogitation, and she wondered whether he was really thinking of
the case at all. Because she was in a lawyer's office she called it a
case, timorously; that made it much more serious. But Alston, in that
instant, was thinking how strange it was that the shabby old office,
witness of his unwilling drudgery and his life-saving excursions into
the gardens of fiction, should be looking now on her, seated there in
her earnestness and purity, and that he should at last be recognising
her. She was a part of him, Alston thought, beloved, not because she was
so different but so like. There was no assault of the alien nature upon
his own, irresistible because so piquing. There were no unexplored
tracts he couldn't at least fancy, green swards and clear waters where a
man might be refreshed. Everything he found there would be, he knew, of
the nature of the approaches to that gentle paradise. What a thing,
remote, extraordinary to think of in his office while she brought him
the details of a tawdry scandal. Yet the office bore, to his eyes,
invisible traces of past occupancy: men and women out of books were
there, absolutely vivid to his eyes, more alive than half the
Addingtonians. The walls