She was still in her public costume and hadn't taken off the gloves she made a point of wearing as a part of that uniform; she remembered how the rustling housekeeper in the Border castle, on whom she had begun by modelling herself, had worn them. She seemed official and slightly distant. "To cover His tracks He must have had to exist. Have we got to give _that_ up?" "No, I don't ask you to give it up _yet_. But there's very little to go upon." "And is that what I'm to tell Them in return for everything?" Gedge waited--he walked about. The place was doubly still after the bustle of the day, and the summer evening rested on it as a blessing, making it, in its small state and ancientry, mellow and sweet. It was good to be there and it would be good to stay. At the same time there was something incalculable in the effect on one's nerves of the great gregarious density. This was an attitude that had nothing to do with degrees and shades, the attitude of wanting all or nothing. And you couldn't talk things over with it. You could only do that with friends, and then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn't betray you. "Couldn't you adopt," he replied at last, "a slightly more discreet method? What we can say is that things have been _said_; that's all we have to do with. 'And is this really'--when they jam their umbrellas into the floor--'the very _spot_ where He was born?' 'So it has, from a long time back, been described as being.' Couldn't one meet Them, to be decent a little, in some such way as that?" She looked at him very hard. "Is that the way _you_ meet them?" "No; I've kept on lying--without scruple, without shame." "Then why do you haul me up?" "Because it has seemed to me we might, like true companions, work it out a little together." This was not strong, he felt, as, pausing with his hands in his pockets, he stood before her; and he knew it as weaker still after she had looked at him a minute. "Morris Gedge, I propose to be _your_ true companion, and I've come here to stay. That's all I've got to say." It was not, however, for "You had better try yourself and see," she presently added. "Give the place, give the story away, by so much as a look, and--well, I'd allow you about nine days. Then you'd see." He feigned, to gain time, an innocence. "They'd take it so ill?" And then as she said nothing: "They'd turn and rend me? They'd tear me to pieces?" But she wouldn't make a joke of it. "They wouldn't _have_ it, simply." "No--They wouldn't. That's what I say. They won't." "You had better," she went on, "begin with Grant-Jackson. But even that isn't necessary. It would get to him, it would get to the Body, like wildfire." "I see," said poor Gedge. And indeed for the moment he did see, while his companion followed up what she believed her advantage. "Do you consider it's _all_ a fraud?"