t query: "Won't
you explain what you mean?"

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 y