uld afford
sixpence for Prussic acid. Fancy being able to kill oneself, or one's
friends, for sixpence! It must have come to a lot more than that in the
Middle Ages. We have every reason to be thankful we are Modern...."

"Don't go from the point. Will you give up the little bottle of Indian
poison, or not?"

"Not. At least, not now! If I hand it to you at the altar, when you have
led me there won't that do?"

Gwen considered, judicially, and appeared to be in favour of accepting
the compromise. "Only remember!" said she, "if you don't produce that
bottle at the altar--with the poison in it still; no cheating!--I shall
cry off, in the very jaws of matrimony." She paused a moment, lest she
should have left a flaw in the contract, then added:--"Whether I have
led you there or not, you know! Very likely you will walk up the aisle
by yourself."

If Adrian had really determined to conceal the Miss Scatcherd incident
from Gwen, so as not to foster false hopes, he should have worded his
reply differently. For no sooner had he said:--"Well--we are all hoping
so," than Gwen exclaimed:--"_Then_ there has been more Septimius
Severus." Adrian accepted this without protest, as ordinary human
speech; and the story feels confident that if its reader will be on the
watch, he will very soon chance across something quite as unlike
book-talk in Nature. Adrian merely said:--"How on earth did you guess
that?" Gwen replied:--"Because you said, 'We are all hoping so'--not
'We hope so.' Can't you see the difference?"

Anyway, Gwen's guess was an accomplished fact, and it was no use
pretending it was wrong. Said Adrian therefore:--"Yes--there _was_ a
little more Septimius Severus. I had rather made up my mind not to talk
about it, in case you should think too much of it." He then narrated the
Miss Scatcherd incident, checked and corrected by Irene from afar. The
narrator minimised the points in favour of his flash of vision, while
his commentator's corrections showed an opposite bias.

Gwen was, strange to say, really uneasy about that little bottle of
Indian poison. Whether there was anything prophetic in this uneasiness,
it is difficult to determine. The decision of common sense will probably
be that she knew that Poets were not to be trusted, and she wished to be
on the safe side. By "common sense" we mean the faculty which
instinctively selects the common prejudices of its age as oriflammes to
follow on Life's battlefield. Hopkins th