"You shall see me safe if you have good eyes," she answered. "But you will not go to the door with me." "Ah!" he said. "Mrs. Wardlaw is only half trusted?" Addie smiled: "What people don't know they can't let out, can they?" "Pray understand that you are quite at liberty to apply that very wise--mark me, that very wise--discovery of yours to my case," said Thorne, looking straight at her. "You talked about good eyes just now. Mine are good or bad as it suits me." At any rate, they were earnest as they met hers. "Don't shut them on my account," said Addie. "No, Percival: you are not like Mrs. Wardlaw. I mean to tell you all about it." But for a moment she did not speak. They were fairly in the wood; the trees were arching high above their heads; their steps were noiseless on the turf below; outside were warmth and daylight still, but here the shadows and the coolness of the night. A leathern-winged bat flitted across their path through the gathering dusk. "They always look like ghosts," said Addie. "Doesn't it seem, Percival, as if the night had come upon us unawares?" As she spoke they reached a little open space. The path forked right and left. "Which way?" said Thorne. "I don't know, I'm sure. There's a cottage on the farther side of the wood, toward the river--" "Is that your destination? To the right, then." And to the right they went. "When you promised to help me," Addie began, "do you remember what you said? I was to consider you as--" She paused, fixing her questioning eyes on him. "As a brother. What then? Have I failed in my duty already?" She shook her head, smiling: "Percival, what do you think that means to me?" "Ah, that's a difficult question. Of course we who have no brothers can only imagine--we cannot know. But I have sometimes fancied that the idea we attach to the word brother is higher because no commonplace reality has ever stepped in to spoil it. For it is an evident fact that some people have brothers who are prosaic, and even disagreeable, while all the noble brothers of history and romance are ours. We may take Lord Tresham for our ideal (you remember Tresham in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon?_), and declare with him-- I think, am sure, a brother's love exceeds All the world's love in its unworldliness." "Stop!" said Addie. "You are going into the question much too enthusiastically and much too poetically. I don't know anything about your Tresham. And you mustn't class me with yourself, 'we who have no brothers.' I have one, Percival." "A brother? You have one? Why, I always fancied--" "Well, a half-brother." Addie made this concession to strict truth with something of reluctance in her tone, as if she did not like to own that her brother could possibly have been any nearer than he was. "It is my brother I am going to meet to-night." Percival, fluent on the subject of brothers in general, was so astonished at the idea of this particular brother or half-brother that he said "Oh!"