ell him that she was not worrying
about Gershom, but about the woman dying all alone in that dark room in
Leigh Street. If he had only looked less disturbed she might have done
so; and when she thought of it afterward, she understood that frankness
would have been by far the wiser course. However, while she wondered
what she ought to say, the opportunity slipped by, and the ringing of
the telephone on his desk called him away from her.

Corinna, meanwhile, was rolling down the drive over the slanting shadows
of the linden trees. She looked thoughtful, for she was trying to decide
what it was about Vetch that made her believe in him so profoundly when
she was with him and yet begin to distrust him as soon as she got far
enough away to gain a perspective? Gossip probably, she reflected. When
she was with him her confidence was the natural response of her own
unbiassed perceptions; when she left him she passed immediately into an
atmosphere that was charged with the suspicions of other people. She
remembered the stories, true or false, which had been hinted and
whispered before the last election. Malicious gossip that, and as
unfounded no doubt as the rest. She recalled the muttered insinuations
of fraudulent political stratagems, of what Benham had called the
Governor's weathercock principles. In Vetch's presence, she realized
that she invariably lost sight of these structural or surface blemishes,
and judged him by some standard which was different from the one she had
inherited with the shape of her nose and the colour of her eyes. What
troubled her was not so much the riddle of Vetch's personality as the
fact that there was another mental world beyond the one she had always
inhabited, and that this other world was filled, like her own, with
obscure moral and spiritual images.

As she approached the club at the corner she saw Benham come out of the
door; and stopping the car she waited, smiling, until he joined her.
While she watched him cross the pavement, she rejoiced in the
thoroughbred fineness and thinness of his appearance--in his clear-cut
Roman features and in the impenetrable reticence of his expression. Yes,
she loved him as well as she could love any man; and that, she told
herself, with a touch of cynical amusement, was just so much and no
more, just enough to bring happiness, but not enough to bring pain.

"I'll take you home," she said, as he reached her, and there seemed to
her something delightful and