me in
a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned
indifferent. This general levity helped me to believe that, so far
as the subject of the tip went, there wasn't much in it. I contrived
however to make him answer a few more questions about it, though he did
so with visible impatience. For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were
all so blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in
the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.
He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another
himself. "It's the very string," he said, "that my pearls are strung
on!" The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn't want to
give us a grain of succour--our destiny was a thing too perfect in its
way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending upon it, and if the
spell was to break it must break by some force of its own. He comes back
to me from that last occasion--for I was never to speak to him again--as
a man with some safe secret for enjoyment. I wondered as I walked away
where he had got _his_ tip.

V

When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he made me
feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He had
instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen's ardent response was in itself
a pledge of discretion. The question would now absorb them, and they
would enjoy their fun too much to wish to share it with the crowd. They
appeared to have caught instinctively Vereker's peculiar notion of
fun. Their intellectual pride, however, was not such as to make them
indifferent to any further light I might throw on the affair they had in
hand. They were indeed of the "artistic temperament," and I was freshly
struck with my colleague's power to excite himself over a question of
art. He called it letters, he called it life--it was all one thing.
In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally for
Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently better
to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of introducing me. I
remember our calling together one Sunday in August at a huddled house in
Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's possession of a friend who
had some light to mingle with his own. He could say things to her that I
could never say to him. She had indeed no sense of humour and, with her
pretty way of holding her head on one side, was one of those persons
whom you want, as the phras