_him_ she was respectable. Over the dryest transactions, at any
rate, their eyes had out these questions. On the third day he put in a
telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray
sovereigns--a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a
second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it. He had
given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had
better not send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle--where she
knew her ladyship then to be--this was because an address to Doctor
Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the added merit of its not
giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a
manner to consider. It was of course most complicated, only half
lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in
which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within
limits, one and the same person. The words he had shown her and then
taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase
"Absolutely impossible." The point was not that she should transmit it;
the point was just that she should see it. What was absolutely
impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker's he should
go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.

The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself
to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she knew was
that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation:
therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might
really stand? It was more and more between them that if he might convey
to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed
chapter, her own case might become different for her, she might
understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing of the
sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power. The
chapter wasn't in the least closed, not for the other party; and the
other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude
and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to
remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and did mind he
could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he
was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out
of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it
into his pocket. It had bee