“It would be like sending me into exile, and you don’t want to do that, do you?” “I don’t know,” she answered with almost the bewilderment of a child. “Oh, I don’t know anything.” It was strange that her phrase should have recalled to him the half-heard phrase Roxie had used. The latter had said, “I dunno” in answer to the question he had asked, carelessly enough, of her. “Everything seems to be getting down to that,” he muttered. “I don’t know very much myself.” CHAPTER XI It was not often that Wilmer remained long awake after retiring to her room. Her days came to a calm and untroubled close with the first approach of drowsiness. The problems which claimed her attention were either of that minor daylight character familiar to all housekeepers or else of so purely an academic nature--being largely those offered by the younger British novelists--that they were as easily laid aside at night as her walking boots. But this evening, instead of hurrying into bed after blowing out her light, she slipped on a dainty negligee and sat by the open window. She enjoyed the feel of the fresh night breeze on her white forehead and warm face. The moon had already lost one section of its brilliant circumference, but enough was left to bathe in a translucent glow the encircling hills which shut in the sleeping valley covered now with a silver veil. A cluster of chestnut-oaks stood below her window slightly to the left of the porch. Fleeting bits of light sifted through the luxuriant foliage like drops of silver rain. The scene before her eyes was both clear and vague; many bits easily recognizable, but the rest complicated with full-bodied shadows. She knew every inch of it, and yet it was veiled in mystery. Knowing there was nothing to fear, still she would have been afraid to walk abroad alone. She would not trust her intelligence to keep in leash her imagination. And yet if her intellect could not do that for her, it was serving her ill. It was--in other ways. Reason should have told her she was making too much of the incident of the afternoon. To treat that seriously was to make too much of Allston himself. And this was dangerous. It destroyed perspective and cloaked the man in mystery--as the night light did the familiar acres and trees before her. This left her the prey to all sorts of illusions--to all sorts of unwarranted timidities. It took her back to childhood and virginal ignorance. This, after her reading had turned the searchlight upon one shadow after another revealing the stark truth. The stark truth was sometimes unpleasant; sometimes tediously innocuous. Never was it romantic. Most men, it seems, were the slaves of fleeting passions; most women, their victims. This ended sometimes in tragedy; sometimes in comedy; sometimes in nothing at all. The greatest tragedy to her was when it ended in nothing at all. She had an orderly mind and liked to reach definite conclusions. She found vagueness depressing.