t a
great many of these stories are not true."

"A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great
many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without
a trace of bitterness.

"I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at,
is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to
ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You
see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just
stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as
with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you."

Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were
considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion,
true.

"There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been
wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a
mistake for us to emphasize the culvert."

So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now.
It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.

"I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with
bright amazement in her eyes.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was
such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a
play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes
a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to
myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And
he parodied an actor's motion in this role.

She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not
understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,

"You haven't _any_ sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a
deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and
diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it
was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had
some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I
never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't."

"My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."

"It isn't polite to disbelieve people," he reproved her; "or at the very
least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it
audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then.
There is somethin