She flushed at sight of him, then almost as quickly went pale. She
stepped outside the door and closed it behind her before she spoke.

"I'm afraid I mustn't let mother know you're here," she said. "She's not
been well these last days and she mustn't be excited. I don't want to
let her suspect that things have changed or in any way gone wrong with
Rose. I told her I was going out for a walk. Will you come with me?"

He nodded and did not even speak until they'd got safely away from the
house. Then:

"I came out here," he said, "almost sure that I should find her. Isn't
she here?"

"No," said Portia. Then she added with a sort of gasp, as if she'd tried
to check her words in their very utterance, "Don't you know her better
than that?"

"Do you know where she is?"

This question she didn't answer at all. They walked on a dozen paces in
silence.

"Portia," he demanded, "is she ill? You'll have to tell me that."

Even this question she didn't answer immediately. "No," she said at
last. "She's not ill. I'll take the responsibility of telling you that."

"You mean that's all you will tell me?" he persisted. "Why? On her
instructions?"

"I think we'll have to sit down somewhere," said Portia. "Beside the
road over there where it's shady."

"I got a letter from Rose yesterday," she said, after they'd been seated
for a while. "She asked me in it not to go on writing you the
little--bulletins that I'd been sending every week; not to tell you
anything at all. So you see I've gone rather beyond her instructions in
saying even as much as I have."

"And you," he asked quickly; "you mean to comply with a request like
that?"

"I must," said Portia. "I can't do anything else."

He made no comment in words, but she interpreted his uncontrollable
gesture of angry protest, and answered it.

"It's not a question of conscientious scruples; keeping my word, not
betraying a confidence; anything like that. A year ago if she'd made
such a request I'd have paid no attention to it. I'd have taken the
responsibility of acting against her wishes, for her own good, if I
happened to see it that way, without any hesitation at all. But Rose has
shown herself so much bigger and stronger a person than I, and she's
done a thing that would have been so splendidly beyond my courage to do
that there's no question of my interfering. She's entitled to make her
own decisions. So," she went on with a little difficulty, "I shan't
betray her con