s, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in
their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions.
She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers
over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying
to maintain, she burst out, in the extremity of her wonder:

"Good heavens! I don't believe it was so at all. You weren't in love
with her. She was with you, and that was the only way she----" Here she
saw the morass her crude candor was leading them both into, and stopped,
but not soon enough for him to miss the look of eager relief sprung into
her eyes. He turned from her and spoke roughly:

"We don't know what we're talking about. Going into things now--why,
it's the merest folly. Haven't we enough to worry over in the matter of
the will? That's the thing we've got to meet next."

She had now, he saw, the consciously sweet and warming smile she had for
him when she wanted to coax him into doing something or ignoring
something she had done.

"I'm in hopes," she said, "you may feel differently after you've read
her letter."

"Her letter?" he repeated, as if that were a superadded shock. "What
letter?"

"It was in the envelope," said Nan soothingly, "with the will."

"Who's it to?"

He was a writer of English, but his extremity was such that only the
briefest slovenliness would serve.

"To you," she said, unclasping her little bag and bringing it out, the
familiar superscription uppermost and the very size and texture of the
envelope so reminiscent of Anne's unchanging habits that he felt again
the pressure of her fine indomitable hand on his.

"Have you," he asked bleakly, "shown that to Whitney?"

"Why, no," said she, in a clear-eyed surprise. "Of course not. It's
addressed to you."

She held it out to him and, after a perceptible pause, he took it from
her and sat holding it, looking over it into the fire, as if he saw his
fate there, or as if he should determine it for himself by tossing the
letter in, to be devoured. Then he became aware that Nan was gathering
herself up to go. It was rather a mental intimation than anything
tangible. She was tight furled, like all the women of that moment of
fashion, and had no flying draperies to collect. But he felt her
flitting and knew at the same instant that he could not lose her, since,
determined as he was to bar her out of the inner recesses of his
unfurnished mental prison, where