He turned from the window to Tom Bradshaw; neither to Mary nor to William, but to Tom. “Did I talk awful tosh?” he asked. “Honestly, I don’t know what I said.” “A young speaker never does, and, some ways, he’s the better for having no tricks of the trade. You’ll do, lad. You’ll do.” Rupert’s face was bright as he heard the approbation of a Bradshaw under the portrait of Reuben Hepplestall. “Hepplestall and proud of it! Did I say that?” William nodded and Rupert looked at him with a puzzled face. “Damn it, it’s true,” he said wonderingly. “May I sign that letter, Uncle William?” CHAPTER XI--STAITHLEY EDGE RUPERT in the office had been all that Mary had dared to hope, and that was the danger of it. She watched him almost distrusting her eyes as she might have watched a sudden conversion at a Salvation Army meeting, as a spectacle that was too fantastic to be accepted at face value. She had an idea that somebody suffered when the penitent reacted from the emotion of the bench. “Always a catch in everything,” she had thought when she avowed her origin to Rupert, though she feared to lose him by the confession, and now she was adventuring again in skepticism, she was hunting the catch, the flaw latent in human happiness. She had won a victory and she expected to pay the price. William invited them to the Hall and Rupert deferred to her with conventional politeness which seemed to her bleak menace. He froze her by his courtesy after he had so pointedly ignored her presence except for the pained surprise with which he had welcomed her, but she tried to believe that she was hypersensitive. She had butted in, into an affair of men, and even if he recognized that she had done the one thing possible, she could hardly expect him to applaud her meddling. Men were not grateful to meddling women. Heaven knew she did not want him to eat the leek for her; and often there were understandings which were better left unspoken. If that was it, if they were tacitly to agree that her trespass was extreme but justified, then she could do very well without more words. She could exult in his silent approbation; but silent resentment would be terrible. It would be terrible but bearable: she was thinking too much of herself and too little of him. She loved, and what mattered in love was not what one got out of it but what one put into it. By a treachery, if he liked to take that view of her interference, she had put more into her love than she had ever put before, she had taken a greater risk and he was signally the gainer by it. He was going to Hepplestall’s, he was a greater Rupert now.