They sat gazing at each other, she as self-willed as her words and he abjectly afraid of her finding out. Why? He could not have told. But it did seem as if he must protect Anne, in the shadows where she lived now, from the flashing directness of this terrible young glance. It was all he could do for her. It was bad enough to have Nan build up a beautiful dream house of eternal love and renunciation. It was infinitely worse to be the cause of her demolishing it. And as his eyes, in sheer terror of leaving her to reflect any more astutely and productively on this, held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in the extremity of her wonder: "Good heavens! I don't believe it was so at all. You weren't in love with her. She was with you, and that was the only way she----" Here she saw the morass her crude candor was leading them both into, and stopped, but not soon enough for him to miss the look of eager relief sprung into her eyes. He turned from her and spoke roughly: "We don't know what we're talking about. Going into things now--why, it's the merest folly. Haven't we enough to worry over in the matter of the will? That's the thing we've got to meet next." She had now, he saw, the consciously sweet and warming smile she had for him when she wanted to coax him into doing something or ignoring something she had done. "I'm in hopes," she said, "you may feel differently after you've read her letter." "Her letter?" he repeated, as if that were a superadded shock. "What letter?" "It was in the envelope," said Nan soothingly, "with the will." "Who's it to?" He was a writer of English, but his extremity was such that only the briefest slovenliness would serve. "To you," she said, unclasping her little bag and bringing it out, the familiar superscription uppermost and the very size and texture of the envelope so reminiscent of Anne's unchanging habits that he felt again the pressure of her fine indomitable hand on his. "Have you," he asked bleakly, "shown that to Whitney?" "Why, no," said she, in a clear-eyed surprise. "Of course not. It's addressed to you."