“You have plenty of brains,” she said, looking at him as if her remark had reference to the size of his head and she was verifying it. “What makes you fancy that you’ve no brains?” “I do the wrong things so often--things that no chap would do if he had brains enough to think whether he should do them or not.” “For instance?” “Oh, for instance? Gloriana! I’ve instances enough. Well, go no further than this moment. I’m not sure that another chap--a chap that remembers things, and knows the decent thing to do--would have stopped you in the way I did.” “Why shouldn’t you stop me if you wished? Why, you were excessively polite in asking me if you might walk with me to keep you from getting in the way of the chauffeur.” “Of course--that’s all right the way you put it; but--but--well, I heard from Mrs. Pearce who you were, and then I read all that in the papers, so that I wasn’t sure if--if--it was just the thing, you know.” “If it was quite in good taste to speak naturally to one who had suffered a recent bereavement?” He nodded, his eyes brightening as if in recognition of the excellent way in which she expressed what was in his mind. He went further, seeming to feel quite pleased that he had in his mind something that could be so well expressed. “Mr. Wingfield,” she said, “you have the highest form of brain power, let me tell you--the power to see in a single glance what most other men would require to have explained to them, and even then not be able to grasp properly. You saw in a moment that I was not the sort of girl who would try to affect the part of the bereaved widow, taking all the circumstances of the bereavement into consideration.” He looked at her in frank admiration for some moments; then he said: “It’s you that have the brains, to see that that is just what I saw. I knew in a moment that you would not put on a woebegone air when you know what everybody else knows, that you have only cause to feel delighted.” “Not exactly----” “I beg your pardon; of course not delighted--a man’s a man--you couldn’t feel delighted to hear of the death of any man, even though he was as great a rascal as the fellow who did his best to drag you down to hell with him. If he had cared the merest scrap for you he never would have asked you to marry him--he would have run away to the other end of the world or cut his throat first.” “Yes; but he’s dead now.” “Yes, I know; _de mortuis_ and the rest; and so no one should speak a word against Judas Iscariot. A kiss--a kiss was the sign of the betrayal.”