id at last, "just exactly in order that you should
do this."

"Do what?"

"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say--

"Then you didn't undress at all?"

He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."

"And when did you go down?"

"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"

"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?"

"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."

"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!

"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw."

"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked.
Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.

XII

The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her,
"words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT
do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to
the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at
school."

"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.

"I don't change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched
and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it
sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a
slip of the tongue, have they so much as al