out the
library."

"I thought we'd agreed that that was all over and done with long ago?"

"Well, you see, it hasn't anything to do with _us_. My father--"

"Don't let us go back to that."

"I'm sorry, but we must--a little. You know my father and I had a
difference of opinion?"

"I know--I know."

"Well, in the end he owned that I was right. That was when he was
dying."

He wished she would not look at him; for he could not look at her. He
was endeavouring to make his tale appear in the last degree natural
and convincing. Up till now he had told nothing but the truth, but as
he was about to enter on the path of perjury he became embarrassed by
the intentness of her gaze.

"You were with him?" she asked.

"Yes." He paused a moment to command a superior kind of calm. That
pause wrecked him, for it gave her also time for thought. "He wanted
either to pay you the money that you should have had, or to hand over
the library; and I thought--"

"But the library was sold?"

He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount
of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.

"Then how," she asked, "was the library redeemed?"

He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional
significance. He desired to lead her gently away from a line of
thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue. "You
can't call it redeemed. Nobody redeemed it. The debt, of course, had
to be paid out of my father's estate."

"In which case the library became yours?"

He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.

"It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go
against my father's wishes by holding on to it."

"Can't you see that it's equally impossible for me to take it?"

"Why? Try and think of it as a simple matter of business."

He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her
feminine persistence and refining fantasy. "It hasn't anything to do
with you or me."

Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed
him in another such dispute nine years ago.

"I am more business-like than you are. I remember perfectly well that
your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the
beginning."

"That needn't trouble you. It has been virtually deducted. I'm sorry
to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and
could not be recovered."

He had given himself away by that word "re