He put up a hand and leaned against a bough of the copper-beech under which we were standing. Well! It seemed going to be a long discussion. I sat down on the garden bench a step or so away, and turned my head to look at the glimmering white trumpets of a tobacco-plant that grew behind the bench. The only form in which tobacco smells anything but poisonous! And there were such beds of it at home ... in the evening it scented all the grounds.... “Major Montresor, as he told you, knew me in my home, knew all my people,” I went on slowly. “He knew all the places I went to before I had to drop out of everything that I cared for and had to slave for my own living in that detestable City of yours.” “You speak as if _I_ owned the City—as if I were responsible for your having had to work there—for the whole thing! Is that fair? Must you go on making me stand for all that? Supposing it hadn’t been there at all that you first met me, Nancy?” For the first time the name slipped out from my official _fiancé_ quite naturally. “Don’t you think,” he went on, “that we might have managed to get on moderately well then?” “How can I tell?” said I. I _wanted_ to keep him on that strictly business footing. This other I didn’t want. I knew it would take something from me, and give me nothing—nothing to stand up for myself with—in its place. “Try to imagine,” he persisted, “that I’d known you in your home, like that chap—what’s-his-name—” The name—Vandeleur—flickered between us once more like that bat in the air! —“like Montresor. Imagine that you’d never been at the Near Oriental—never heard of the place. I’m sure I often wish _I_ hadn’t,” the Governor’s voice came ruefully out of the dusk. “Then, instead of this eternal sparring—” “My only refuge,” I thought, “and he’s trying to turn me out of it!” —“there might surely have been something distinctly resembling friendship between us?” he said. I said obstinately, “Might there? I don’t know.” He moved. There wasn’t enough light to see his face. Only his collar made a white blur against the branch, and the broad slope of his shoulders showed dark against the sky that had deepened from lilac to purple. “But I know,” he said quietly, “that you could—that you _could_ be——” He paused. “Well?” I said, rather uncomfortably. “I could be what?” “Rather a little brick to me if you chose,” said the Governor. I am sure it slipped out without his meaning it to. _He_ would have been ready to go on arguing quite logically about “how much more sensible” et cetera.... How there was “absolutely no valid reason why it shouldn’t” and so forth ... for another hour! _He_ can’t know how the key of a logical argument will fumble forever at the locked safe-door of a woman’s mind that could just fly open to the cipher spelt “Appreciation.” —“Rather a little brick.” So he did think me capable of that?