After I had been at pains to give out the information that I was engaged as it were at large and without further particularity, I had begun, as you have already guessed, to be the victim of my own ingenuity. Our committances have this way of taking matters into their own hands. I had quickly found it impossible to be thus unspecifically betrothed. Too many questions had instantly sprung up, and Archie, if not Miss Levey, had known too much about the circumstances of my life. At first I had tried to fob him off by speaking of "some girl in the City," but that had been useless. If that was so, he had wanted to know (probably having gossipped it all over with Miss Levey), why did I never see her in the evenings, and why was I so often at liberty on Saturday afternoons and Sundays? I had protested, I had made jokes. How, I had demanded, did _he_ know where I passed my spare time?... Well, he knew (he had retorted) where I spent five evenings out of the seven! Miss Levey, you see, had started him, and it amused him to go on. And so his intrusiveness had begun to narrow me down to the college itself. This had given me the choice of just two _inamorata_--Miss Causton and Miss Windus (for I still supposed that Miss Causton might walk into the college as usual any evening). To the latter lady I was at that time exceedingly averse; and on the night of this conversation of which I speak, after Archie had been almost beyond endurance jestingly importunate, I had all but declared myself point blank for the absent Miss Causton. (The conversation had taken place in his rooms.) "The question is, Archie," I said gravely, looking at him with sharp doubt in my eyes, "can I trust you? I suspect you've already set something going, you know." He had coloured a little. A mere honourable understanding was never in the least binding on him, and I was never quite sure to what extent the exaction of a definite promise would be so. "Oh, dash it all, Jeff!" he had scoffed rather awkwardly, "anybody'd think you were ashamed of it! All I said was quite harmless--really----" "I know," I had commented, "_meaning_ no harm. Nine-tenths of the harm in the world's done that way. I don't know that I don't prefer the man who means harm; at least he knows what he's doing.... But why are you so curious about it all?" His curiosity, I knew, was nothing more or less than a slack indulgence of his desire to hear a secret. He had too Miss Levey's racial gift of turning these things to account. But he had put it rather differently. "Oh, just friendly interest," he had replied, slapping his jacket pocket. "Where did I put my cigarette case?... We _are_ friends, aren't we?" "Rather less so when you go chattering about me." "Sorry, old man," he had replied contritely, though his contrition had been less for his blabbing than that I apparently had taken it amiss. "I didn't think--you didn't tell me not--it slipped out----"