Worldly-wise Mrs. Lenoir took up a middle position. She was not prepared for Tora's uncompromising doctrine; yet she agreed with the view that there was much to be said for telling people what they might probably find out--and find out too late in their own opinion. All the same, she dissented from Stephen's extreme application of the rule of candour. "You wouldn't accept a man without telling him, but you needn't blurt it out to anybody who makes you a few pretty speeches." "Wouldn't it be fair to tell him before he got much in love?" "If he wasn't much in love, he'd be rather inclined to smile over your telling him, wouldn't he?" The suggestion went home to Winnie. "I shouldn't want to risk that." "Unless circumstances make it absolutely necessary, I should let things stay as they are till your case is over, at all events. It'll be so much pleasanter for you to be incog. till then." There was something in that suggestion too. Not great on theory, Mrs. Lenoir took good practical points. "It's rather giving up my point of view," Winnie objected. Mrs. Lenoir smiled in a slightly contemptuous kindness. "Oh, my poor child, take a holiday from your point of view, as well as from all the rest of it. And really it's quixotic of you to be so much afraid of giving some man or other a little shock, after all they've made you suffer." Winnie felt the appeal to the cause of the sex also. In short all Mrs. Lenoir's points told; they seemed full of workaday wisdom and reasonable common-sense. "Just don't think about it again till after the case. Promise me." "That is best, I think, in the end. Yes, I promise, Mrs. Lenoir." Mrs. Lenoir said nothing about the possibility of the two officers 'turning up' at Madeira--or at Southampton docks. Diplomacy forbade; the connection would have been too rudely obvious; it might have led Winnie to reconsider her pledge. In fact things were so managed--mainly by a policy of masterly inactivity, tempered by just one hint to the General--that the first Winnie heard of this idea came neither from Mrs. Lenoir nor from the General, but from Bertie Merriam himself. Emanating from that quarter, the suggestion could not be brusquely repelled; it was bound to meet with courteous consideration. Indeed, to refuse to accept it would be extremely difficult. To Mrs. Lenoir Winnie might have avowed the only possible objection; she could not so much as hint at it to the Major. Mrs. Lenoir knew her way about, as the colloquial phrase has it.