ated, stated very
fully."

"There's nothing about the report the Professor did give. You remember
you told me about it?"

"Oh, no, he gave no report."

"Well, you called it a draft report."

"No, no, did I? That was a careless way of speaking if I did. He
certainly sent me some considerations which had occurred to him at the
beginning of his inquiry, but they were based on insufficient information
and were purely provisional. They did not in any sense constitute a
report. It would have been positively misleading to speak of them in any
such way." He was growing eager, animated, almost excited.

May was not inclined to cross-examine him; she knew that he would develop
his case for himself if she sat and listened.

"The whole thing was so inchoate as to be worth nothing," he went on. "We
simply discarded it from our minds; we didn't let it weigh one way or the
other."

"The directors didn't?" That little question she could not resist asking.

"Oh, it was never laid before them. As I tell you, Mandeville and I
decided that it could not be regarded as a report, or even as an
indication of Maturin's opinion. We only referred to Maturin at all
because--because we wanted to be absolutely candid."

May smiled; absolute candour resulted, as it seemed to her, in giving
rise to an impression that the Professor had been in favour of the merits
of the Alethea.

"And you won't show it to the directors?"

"No," said Quisante, "certainly not." He paused for a moment and then
added slowly, "In fact it has not been preserved. What is stated there is
based on my own personal discussions with the Professor, and on
Mandeville's; the few lines he wrote added nothing."

It had not been preserved; it had sunk from a report to a draft report,
from a draft report to considerations, from considerations to a few lines
which added nothing; the minimising process, pursued a little further,
had ended in a total disappearance. And nobody knew that it had ever
existed, even as considerations, even as a few lines adding nothing,
except her husband, cousin Mandeville, and herself.

"If the Professor himself," Quisante resumed, "had considered it of any
moment, he would have kept a copy or some memorandum of it; but there was
not a word about it among his papers."

There was safety, then, so far as the Professor was concerned; and so far
as Quisante was concerned; of course, also, so far as cousin Mandeville
was concerned. But Quisante's