This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed. "If only what?" she said, looking up at him. "Oh, I don't know--as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about these things----" "But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours." "You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to know, then?" "Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang." "Ah!" said Mr. Strong.... Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should deviate from straightness, very well; that was their look-out. He had been a good many things in his time--solicitor's clerk, free-lance journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that he should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if in his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for her to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well in his rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can get. His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned. Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came into her cheeks. Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her.... She _had_ got something from Mr. Strong at last! Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Strong _had_ cared that that foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something else--a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat.... So _that_ was at the bottom of his reserve! _That_ was the meaning of his "buts"!...