Perfect openness and candour about them by all means!"

"I am quite serious. One never knows how much harm may be done by
concealing them."

"Got a murder on your conscience?"

"Oh, not exactly," sighed Eleanor.

"You're like that chap Kilshaw. He's always talking as if he had
something awful up his sleeve."

"Perhaps he has."

As Eleanor said this, she jumped up and ran to meet Alicia, whom she saw
coming towards her. Lady Eynesford had wasted no time over her task.

The Captain, being left alone, did the appropriate thing. He
soliloquised.

"She'd have told me in another half-minute," said he, with a chuckle.
"It was choking her. Yet she's a sensible one as they go."

Whom or what class he meant by "they" it is merciful to his ignorant
prejudices to leave unrevealed.

CHAPTER XVIII.

BY AN OVERSIGHT OF SOCIETY'S.

Francois Gaspard was a pleasant and cheerful man, good company, and
genial to his neighbours and comrades, but it may be doubted whether
Society had not made a grave mistake in not hanging him at the earliest
opportunity. In his younger days he had lived in perpetual warfare
against Society, its institutions and constitutions--a warfare that he
carried on without scruple and without quarter: he would have had no
cause for complaint had he been dealt with on this basis of his own
choosing. Society, however, had chosen to fancy that it could reform
Francois, or, failing that, could keep him alive and yet harmless.
Thanks to this sanguine view, he found himself, at the age of
forty-five, a free man in New Lindsey; and, thinking that he and his
native country had had about enough of one another, he had enrolled
himself as a subject of her Majesty, and had plunged into the affairs of
his new home with his usual energy. Francois was not indeed quite the
man he had been in his palmy time, his nerve was not so good, and his
life was more comfortable, and therefore not so lightly to be risked;
but he had made no renunciations, and often regretted that New Lindsey
was a barren soil, wherein the seed he sowed bore little fruit. He could
not be happy without a secret society, and that he had established in
Kirton; but it was, he ruefully admitted, hardly more than a toy, a
mockery, the merest _simulacrum_. The members displayed no alacrity;
they were but five all told, besides himself: a bookseller's assistant,
a watchmaker (he was a German, but the larger cause harmonised all
differences), two