"I do not know what you call hurry," he replies drily; "I have been awaiting this mystic utterance for sixteen or seventeen hours." Her sallow cheek takes on a pinky tinge of mortification at his accent. "You are quite right," she answers quickly; "I have no business to keep you waiting. I meant to tell you as soon as we got here; I asked you to bring me here on purpose, only----" "You told me that you must make the communication at some place where it would not matter if you did break down," says he, rather harshly helping her memory; "you must allow that that was not an encouraging exordium. Do you look upon this"--glancing ironically round--"as a particularly suitable place for breaking down?" Again that pain-evidencing wave of colour flows into her face. There is such an unloving mockery in his displeased voice. "I shall not break down," she replies, forcing herself to speak with quiet composure; "you need not be afraid that I shall. I know that yesterday I was foolish enough to say the very words you quote, but I was not quite myself then; I did not quite know what I was saying; I had only just heard it." "_It?_ What IT? Is this a new riddle? For Heaven's sake let us hear the answer to the first before we embark on any fresh one!" "It is no riddle," replies she, her low patient tones contrasting with his exasperated ones, "nothing could be plainer; it was only that I happened to overhear something rather--rather painful--something that was not intended for me." His angry cheek blanches as his thought flies arrow-quick to the one subject of his perennial apprehension. Someone has been poisoning her ear with cowardly libels, or yet more dreadful truths about Elizabeth Le Marchant. For a moment or two his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, then he says in a tone which he uselessly tries to make one of calm contempt alone: "If you had lived longer in Florence, you would know how much importance to attach to its tittle-tattle and _cancans_." She shakes her head with a sorrowful obstinacy. "This was no tittle-tattle--no _cancan_." Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion. "It is astonishing," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the best women are to believe evil; what--what evidence have you of the truth of--of these precious stories?" "What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him--"the evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along." Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in a stupefied tone: "Have known what all along?"