. Jurd said, was not at all satisfied with her--er--her
present situation.

The Colonel lowered his eyes for one iniquitous instant while Mrs.
Tailleur, disguised as Miss Keating's present situation, laughed through
the veil and trailed before him her unabashed enormity.

He managed to express, with becoming gravity, his approval of the
scheme. He only wondered whether it might not be better for Miss Keating
to stay where she was until the morning, that her step might not seem so
precipitate, so marked.

Miss Keating replied that she thought she had been sufficiently
compromised already.

"I don't think," said the Colonel, "that I should put it that way."

He felt that by putting it that way Miss Keating had brought them a
little too near what he called the verge, the verge they were all so
dexterously avoiding. He would have been glad if he could have been kept
out of this somewhat perilous debate, but, since the women had dragged
him into it, it was his business to see that it was confined within the
limits of comparative safety. Goodness knew where they would be landed
if the women lost their heads.

He looked gravely at Miss Keating.

That look unnerved her, and she took a staggering step that brought her
within measurable distance of the verge.

The Colonel might put it any way he liked, she said. There must not be a
moment's doubt as to her attitude.

Now it was not her attitude that the Colonel was thinking of, but his
own. It had been an attitude of dignity, of judicial benevolence, of
incorruptible reserve. Any sort of unpleasantness was agony to a man who
had the habit of perfection. It was dawning on him that unless he
exercised considerable caution he would find himself mixed up in an
uncommonly disagreeable affair. He might even be held responsible for
it, since the dubiousness of the topic need never have emerged if he had
not unveiled it to his wife. So that, when Miss Keating, in her
unsteadiness, declared that there must not be a moment's doubt as to her
attitude, the Colonel himself was seized with a slight vertigo. He
suggested that people (luckily he got no nearer it than that)--people
were, after all, entitled to the benefit of any doubt there might be.

Then, when the danger was sheer in front of them, he drew back. Miss
Keating, he said, had nobody but herself to please. He had no more light
to throw on the--er--the situation. Really, he said to himself, they
couldn't have hit on a mor