not, but that has nothing to
do with the matter. I cannot feel it in my bones--as Mrs. Bailey
says--that any woman you could care for would back out of it because you
... because of this dreadful accident." Her voice was irresolute in
referring to it, and some wandering wave of that electricity that her
finger-tips were so full of made a cross-circuit and quickened the
beating of her hearer's heart. The vessel it struck in mid-ocean had no
time to right itself before another followed. "Surely--if she were worth
a straw--if she were worth the name of a woman at all--she would feel it
her greatest happiness to make it up to you for such...." She was going
to say "a privation," but she always shied off designating the calamity.
In her hurry to escape from "privation" she landed her speech in a
phrase she had not taken the full measure of--"Well--perhaps I oughtn't
to say that! I may be taking the young woman's name in vain. I only mean
that that is what _I_ should feel in her position."

It had come as a chance speech before she saw its bearings. There was
not the ghost of an _arriere pensee_ behind the simple fact that she had
no choice but to judge another woman's mind by her own; a natural
thought! Her first instinct was to spoil the force she had not meant it
to have, by dragging the red herring of some foolish joke across the
trail.

But--to think of it! Here had she been hatching such a brave scheme of
making her own life, and all the devotion she somehow believed she could
give, a compensation for a great wrong, and here she was now affrighted
at the smell of powder! Pride stepped in, and the memory of Quintus
Curtius. No--she would not say a single word to undo the effect of her
heedlessness. Let the worst stand! They had left her in the place of
that hypothesis whom she had herself discarded. It was no fault of hers
that had involved her personally. Was she bound to back out? She bit her
lip to check her own impulse to utter some cheap corrective.

Until that rather scornful disclaimer of the Duke's son, Mrs. Bailey's
piece of fashionable intelligence had served--whether Adrian believed it
or not--as a sort of chaperon's aegis extended over this interview. It
had protected him against himself--against his impulse to break through
a silence that his three weeks' memory of this girl's image had made
painful. Recollect that her radiant beauty, in that setting sun-gleam,
was the last thing human his eyes had rested