nicer than that adorable
Pauline! You tax belief. But I want to know what happened. Had she read
his book?"

"Nothing happened," said Peter. "I warned you that it was a drama
without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay's secret
soul. But externally, nothing. They simply chatted together--exchanged
the time o' day--like any pair of acquaintances. No, I don't think she
had read his book. She did read it afterwards, though."

"And liked it?"

"Yes--she said she liked it."

"Well--? But then-?" the Duchessa pressed him, insistently. "When
she discovered the part she had had in its composition--? Was n't she
overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested--surprised--moved?"

She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips were
slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the
exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart fluttered again. "I must be
cautious, cautious," he remembered, and made a strenuous "act of will"
to steady himself.

"Oh, she never discovered that," he said.

"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes darkened--with
dismay, with incomprehension. "Do you--you don't--mean to say that
he didn't tell her?" There was reluctance to believe, there was a
conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.

Peter had to repeat his act of will.

"How could he tell her?" he asked.

She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of
pained astonishment.

"How could he help telling her?" she cried. "But--but it was the one
great fact between them. But it was a fact that intimately concerned
her--it was a fact of her own destiny. But it was her right to be told.
Do you seriously mean that he did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What
could have possessed him?"

There was something like a tremor in her voice. "I must appear entirely
nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.

"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he
had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as
his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already a liberty to embody his notion
of her in a novel--in a published book, for daws to peck at--it would
have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.
That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
particeps criminis."

"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the
head. "His foolish British self-consc