itation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt
Maud?"

"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."

Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"

He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had
naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank
you very much."

Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already
risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance
of it I'll go this very night."

"Then go," said Kate Croy.

He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what
was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but
much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They
walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had
become of a sudden, in all truth, a split--as if the basis of his
departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the
arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that
produced for them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any your
idea requires, if you'll only come to me."

"Come to you?"

"Come to me."

"How? Where?"

She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in
her being so equal to him. "To my rooms, which are perfectly possible,
and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt,
in view. We can arrange it--with two grains of courage. People in our
case always arrange it." She listened as for the good information, and
there was support for him--since it was a question of his going step by
step--in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had
in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence
of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to
_see_ her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet
done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a
fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. _With_
you I can do it--I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself.
Without you--I'll