t sounds," his friend returned, "as if I rather overloaded--what's
the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?--your intellectual board.
If there's a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away.
I've never put before you anything like this."

He spoke with a weight that in the great space, where it resounded a
little, made an impression--an impression marked by the momentary pause
that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning
to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension
of their becoming perhaps too solemn. "Well, you immensely interest
me and you really couldn't have chosen a better time. A secret--for we
shall make it that of course, shan't we?--at this witching hour, in this
great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the
whole thing a rare remembrance. So I assure you the more you put before
me the better."

Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as
a direct consequence of Vanderbank's tone. After he had laid it down he
put on his glasses; then fixing his companion he brought out: "Have you
no idea at all--?"

"Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how SHOULD I have?"

"Well, I'm wondering if I shouldn't perhaps have a little in your place.
There's nothing that in the circumstances occurs to you as likely I
should want to say?"

Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as a
trifle uneasy. "When you speak of 'the circumstances' you do a thing
that--unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular
moment--always of course opens the door of the lurid for a man of
any imagination. To such a man you've only to give a nudge for his
conscience to jump. That's at any rate the case with mine. It's never
quite on its feet--so it's now already on its back." He stopped a
little--his smile was even strained. "Is what you want to put before me
something awful I've done?"

"Excuse me if I press this point." Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if
his friend's anxiety grew his own thereby diminished. "Can you think of
nothing at all?"

"Do you mean that I've done?"

"No, but that--whether you've done it or not--I may have become aware
of."

There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank's expression, on
this, of his having mastered the secret of humouring without appearing
to patronise. "I think you ought to give me a little more of a clue."

Mr. Longdon took off hi