"Well, I grant you there was somebody. But the details are naught. The links are missing. The evidence--in particular about that room upstairs, in itself our Casa Santa--is _nil_. It was so awfully long ago." Which he knew again sounded weak. "Of course it was awfully long ago--that's just the beauty and the interest. Tell Them, _tell_ Them," she continued, "that the evidence is _nil_, and I'll tell Them something else." She spoke it with such meaning that his face seemed to show a question, to which she was on the spot of replying, "I'll tell Them you're a----" She stopped, however, changing it. "I'll tell Them exactly the opposite. And I'll find out what you say--it won't take long--to do it. If we tell different stories _that_ possibly may save us." "I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an oddity, have a success of curiosity. It might become a draw. Still, They but want broad masses." And he looked at her sadly. "You're no more than one of Them." "If it's being no more than one of Them to love it," she answered, "then I certainly am. And I'm not ashamed of my company." "To love _what_?" said Morris Gedge. "To love to think He was born there." "You think too much. It's bad for you." He turned away with his chronic moan. But it was without losing what she called after him. "I decline to let the place down." And what was there indeed to say? They _were_ there to keep it up. V He kept it up through the summer, but with the queerest consciousness, at times, of the want of proportion between his secret rage and the spirit of those from whom the friction came. He said to himself--so sore his sensibility had grown--that They were gregariously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them as individually mild. He said to himself that They were mild only because _he_ was--he flattered himself that he was divinely so, considering what he might be; and that he should, as his wife had warned him, soon enough have news of it were he to deflect by a hair's breadth from the line traced for him. _That_ was the collective fatuity--that it was capable of turning on the instant both to a general and to a particular resentment. Since the least breath of discrimination would get him the sack without mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to speak of his discomfort as light. He was gagged, he was goaded, as in omnivorous companies he doubtless sometimes showed by a strange silent glare. They'd get him the sack for that as well, if he didn't look out; therefore wasn't it in effect ferocity when you mightn't even hold your tongue? They wouldn't let you off with silence--They insisted on your committing yourself. It was the pound of flesh--They _would_ have it; so under his coat he bled. But a wondrous peace, by exception, dropped on him one afternoon at the end of August. The pressure had, as usual, been high, but it had diminished with the fall of day, and the place was empty before the hour for closing. Then it was that, within a few minutes of