"You assured me, you remember, that Jack was above any such meanness; and so far you relieved me, for I saw you were telling the truth. But," she continued, "I saw also that it wasn't the whole truth: that you were hiding something. So I went away puzzled. Afterwards, I got the truth out of Jimmy Collingwood." "Well?" I prompted her, as she paused. "Well, it was shocking of Jack, I admit. But, after all, this Mr. Farrell had ruined his life, and--of course I don't quite understand men and their code--but isn't it a trifle uncharitable of you, Roddy, not to allow that the shock may have unhinged his mind for a time? . . . No, I'm playing the humbug in _my_ turn, and I'll own up. It was wicked, if you will: but it was great in its way, and determined . . . and women, you know, always fall slaves to that sort of thing. It was straightforward, too: Jimmy said Jack had given his man fair warning. Jimmy--but you know that boy's way--gave me the impression that he didn't condemn Jack's craze as unsportsmanlike: merely for being, as he put it, a thought bloodthirstier than any line of sport he himself felt any inclination to follow. 'But I'm no judge, Con,' he added--I remember his words--'for the simple reason that I never had a career to be ruined.' . . . Well, for the rest, Jack says he came straight to you as soon as he set foot back in England, and told you the whole story.--That's so, I guess?" Constantia, in her agitation, relapsed into her mother's idiom. I nodded, bending my head still lower over the high chimney-shelf, still staring down into the fire. "Then you _know_," she said; "and I _do_ call it rather dull of you, Roddy--not to say insensate--and unlike you, anyway. . . . When, at the end, he turned and behaved so finely, nursing this man through his last illness. . . ." I tell you, it was lucky that I still kept my face turned sideways, still staring down on the fire. . . . It took me like a mental nausea, and all my thought for the moment was to hold steady under it. I felt my fingers gripping hard on the ledge and holding to it, as the waves went over my poor brain. Through the surge of them confusedly I heard her voice pleading: and yet her voice was calm, well under control. It must have been the waves in my own head that broke her speech into short sentences. "You were his friend . . . his best friend . . . mine, too, Roddy. You took it so well, just now . . . I _do_ want--" What in the world could I say? How lift and turn my face to her? How answer? . . . And yet within a second or two I must lift my face and make some answer. Her voice was already trailing off plaintively. I heard her catch her breath-- And then--thank God--I heard a brisk, happy footstep in the outer passage, and Jimmy burst into the room with his accustomed whoop.