Jim draws a long breath, and leans back in his corner of the fiacre. He has gained the information he sought. It has come to his hand at the very time he was chafing most at his inability to go in quest of it. "So your interruption was the more provoking," continues Cecilia, her indignation puffing out and ruffling its feathers at the recollection of her wrongs, "as it was our last chance of meeting; however, you cut your own throat, as he evidently knew something very interesting about your dear friends; something which he does not generally tell people, and which he would not have told me only that he saw at once I was no blab." Jim shivers. He had only just been in time then--only just in time to stop the mouth of this blatant backbiter in priest's raiment. His companion looks at him curiously. "Are you cold," she asks, "or did a goose walk over your grave? Why did you shiver?" He pulls himself together. "I was shivering," he says, compelling himself to assume the rallying tone in which he is apt to address the girl beside him, "at the thought of the peril I had saved you from. My poor Cis, have not you and I suffered enough already at the hands of the Church?" She reddens. "Though I do not pretend to any great sensitiveness on the subject, I think you have worn that old joke nearly off its legs." But during the rest of the drive she utters no further lament over her lost clergyman. CHAPTER XVII. It is past seven o'clock by the time that the party breaks up at the door of the Anglo-Américain, and the dusk is gaining even upon the red west that, in the upper sky, is insensibly melted into that strange faint green that speaks, in so plain a language, of past and future fine weather. "Are you coming to look in upon us to-night?" asks Amelia, with a rather wistful diffidence, as her lover holds out his hand in farewell to her. He hesitates. In his own mind he had planned another disposition of his evening hours to that suggested by her. "What do you advise?" he asks. "Shall you spend the evening in the usual way?" "I suppose so," she answers. "I suppose we shall read aloud; you know father likes to make our evenings as like our home ones as possible, and Sybilla----" "Then it is no use my coming," interrupts he hastily. "I should have no good of you;" then, seeing her face fall at his alacrity in seizing a pretence for escape, he adds, "but, of course, if you wish it, dear--if it would give you any satisfaction----" "But it would not," cries she precipitately, anxious as usual to be, if possible, beforehand with his lightest wish; "when you are by, I always lose my place"--laughing tremulously--"and father scolds me! No, you had far better not come. I must not be greedy"--in a lower key. "I had quite half an hour, nearly three-quarters, of you this afternoon."