n the speaker's words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
block. Glennard, under his wife's composure, detected a sensibility to
this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth; but Alexa's candor
was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
landmarks to travel by.

Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind
the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic
enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went
to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he
saw the second volume of the "Letters" lying open on his wife's table.
He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been
reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He
dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that
one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem
like that...?

Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was right--it
IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read it!"

Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
generation the book will be a classic."

"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her--"

"Did he?" came from Flamel.

"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
feel dreadfully... he wouldn't read it... he didn't want me to read it.
I didn't understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
must seem to him. It's so much worse to surprise a friend's secrets than
a stranger's."

"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd known her I'm sure you'd feel as
he does...."

Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity