He was only making it impossible
for him to avoid confession, for his own sake. He did not wait for
the stammering to take form, but continued:

"I mean the young lady you told Sally about--the young lady you
are hesitating to propose to because there'll be what you call
complications in medicine--complications about your mamma, to put it
plainly.... Oh yes, of course, Sally told me all about it directly."
Vereker cannot resist a laugh, for all his embarrassment, a laugh
which somehow had the image of Sally in it. "She _would_, you know.
Sally's the sort of party that--that, if she'd been Greek, would
have been the daughter of an Arcadian shepherdess and a thunderbolt."

"Of course she would. I say, Fenwick, look here...."

"Have another cigar, old man."

"No, I've smoked enough. That one's lasted all the time since we came
out. Look here--what I want to say is ... well, that I was a great
fool--did wrong in fact--to talk to Sally about that young lady...."

"And to that young lady about Sally," Fenwick says quietly. For half
a second--such alacrity has thought--Vereker takes his meaning wrong;
thinks he really believes in the other young lady. Then it flashes
on him, and he knows how his companion has been seeing through him
all the while. But so lovable is Fenwick, and so much influence is
there in the repose of his strength, that there is no resentment
on Vereker's part that he should be thus seen through. He surrenders
at discretion.

"I see you know," he says helplessly.

"Know you love Sally?--of course I do! So does her mother. So does
yours, for that matter. So does every one, except herself. Why, even
you yourself know it! _She_ never will know it unless she hears it on
the best authority--your own, you know."

"Ought I to tell her? I know I was all wrong about that humbug-girl I
cooked up to tell her about. I altogether lost my head, and was a fool."

"I can't see what end you proposed to yourself by doing it," says
Fenwick a little maliciously. "If Sally had recommended you to speak
up, because it was just possible the young lady might be pining for
you all the time, you couldn't have asked her _her_ name, and then
said, 'That's hers--you're her!' like the fat boy in 'Pickwick.'
No!--I consider, my dear boy, that you didn't do yourself any good by
that ingenious fiction. You know all the while you wouldn't have been
sorry to think she understood you."

"I don't know that I didn't think she did. I