sight of the fact that it is just among
ourselves the thing has happened."

"Oh, oh! Now you're ridiculous!"

"I might be, if the thing had happened anywhere but in this town; but
think a moment. How much do we know of the people we meet, where they
were, and who they were, before they came here? There's a case in point.
It was not quite 'among ourselves' this morning."

"Harry, how horrid of you!" She was on the point of declaring that she
knew Kerr very well indeed; but she remembered this might not be the
thing to say to Harry.

"My dear girl, I'm not saying anything against him. I only remarked that
we did not know him."

"Don't _you_, Harry?"

He gave her a quick look. "Why, what put that into your head?"

"I--I don't know. I thought you looked at him very hard last night in
the picture gallery. And afterward, at supper, don't you remember, you
did not want me to mention your connection with something or other he
was talking about?"

"Something or other he was talking about?" Harry inquired with a
frowning smile.

"I think it was about that Embassy ball--"

"_I_ didn't want you to mention the Embassy ball?" he repeated, and now
he was only smiling. "My dear child, surely you are dreaming."

She looked at him with the bewildered feeling that he was flatly
contradicting himself. And yet she could remember he had not shaken his
head at her. He had only nodded. Could it be that her cherished
imagination had played her a trick at last? But the next moment it
occurred to her that somehow she had been led away from her first
question.

"Then _have_ you seen him, Harry?" she insisted.

"No!" He jerked it out so sharply that it startled her, but she stuck to
her subject.

"And you wouldn't have minded my telling him you had been at that ball?"

There was a pause while Harry looked at the fire. Then--"Look here," he
burst out, "did he ask you about it?"

"Oh, no," she protested. "I only just happened to wonder."

He stared at her as if he would have liked to shake her. But then he
rose from his frowning attitude before the fire, came over to her, sat
on the arm of her chair, and, with the tip of one finger under her chin,
lifted her face; but she did not lift her eyes. She heard only his
voice, very low, with a caressing note that she hardly knew as Harry's.

"It isn't that I care _what_ you say to him. The fact is, Flora, I
suppose I was a little jealous, but I naturally don't like the
suggestion tha