This was the greater complication that, with the return of the spring and the increase of the public, her services were more required. She took the field with him from an early hour; she was present with the party above while he kept an eye, and still more an ear, on the party below; and how could he know, he asked himself, what she might say to them and what she might suffer _Them_ to say--or in other words, poor wretches, to believe--while removed from his control? Some day or other, and before too long, he couldn't but think, he must have the matter out with her--the matter, namely, of the _morality_ of their position. The morality of women was special--he was getting lights on that. Isabel's conception of her office was to cherish and enrich the legend. It was already, the legend, very taking, but what was she there for but to make it more so? She certainly wasn't there to chill any natural piety. If it was all in the air--all in their "eye," as the vulgar might say--that He _had_ been born in the Birthroom, where was the value of the sixpences they took? where the equivalent they had engaged to supply? "Oh dear, yes--just about _here_"; and she must tap the place with her foot. "Altered? Oh dear, no--save in a few trifling particulars; you see the place--and isn't that just the charm of it?--quite as _He_ saw it. Very poor and homely, no doubt; but that's just what's so wonderful." He didn't want to hear her, and yet he didn't want to give her her head; he didn't want to make difficulties or to snatch the bread from her mouth. But he must none the less give her a warning before they had gone _too_ far. That was the way, one evening in June, he put it to her; the affluence, with the finest weather, having lately been of the largest and the crowd all day fairly gorged with the story. "We mustn't, you know, go _too_ far." The odd thing was that she had now ceased even to be conscious of what troubled him--she was so launched in her own career. "Too far for what?" "To save our immortal souls. We mustn't, love, tell too many lies." She looked at him with dire reproach. "Ah now are you going to begin again?" "I never _have_ begun; I haven't wanted to worry you. But, you know, we don't know anything about it." And then as she stared, flushing: "About His having been born up there. About anything really. Not the least little scrap that would weigh in any other connexion as evidence. So don't rub it in so." "Rub it in how?" "That He _was_ born----" But at sight of her face he only sighed. "Oh dear, oh dear!" "Don't you think," she replied cuttingly, "that He was born anywhere?" He hesitated--it was such an edifice to shake. "Well, we don't know. There's very little _to_ know. He covered His tracks as no other human being has ever done."