"They show _me_. It's in all their little books." "You mean," the husband asked, "that you've only to hold your tongue?" "I try to," said Gedge. "Well," his visitor smiled, "I see you _can_." Gedge hesitated. "I can't." "Oh well," said his friend, "what does it matter?" "I do speak," he continued. "I can't sometimes not." "Then how do you get on?" Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense, than ever at any one--even at Isabel when she frightened him. "I don't get on. I speak," he said--"since I've spoken to _you_." "Oh _we_ shan't hurt you!" the young man reassuringly laughed. The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened, the end of the visit was indicated. They turned together out of the upper room and came down the narrow stair. The words just exchanged might have been felt as producing an awkwardness which the young woman gracefully felt the impulse to dissipate. "You must rather wonder why we've come." And it was the first note for Gedge of a further awkwardness--as if he had definitely heard it make the husband's hand, in a full pocket, begin to fumble. It was even a little awkwardly that the husband still held off. "Oh we like it as it is. There's always _something_." With which they had approached the door of egress. "What is there, please?" asked Morris Gedge, not yet opening the door, since he would fain have kept the pair on, and conscious only for a moment after he had spoken that his question was just having for the young man too dreadfully wrong a sound. This personage wondered yet feared, and had evidently for some minutes been putting himself a question; so that, with his preoccupation, the caretaker's words had represented to him inevitably: "What is there, please, for _me_?" Gedge already knew with it moreover that he wasn't stopping him in time. He had uttered that challenge to show he himself wasn't afraid, and he must have had in consequence, he was subsequently to reflect, a lamentable air of waiting. The visitor's hand came out. "I hope I may take the liberty----?" What afterwards happened our friend scarcely knew, for it fell into a slight confusion, the confusion of a queer gleam of gold--a sovereign fairly thrust at him; of a quick, almost violent motion on his own part, which, to make the matter worse, might well have sent the money roiling on the floor; and then of marked blushes all round and a sensible embarrassment; producing indeed in turn rather oddly and ever so quickly an increase of communion. It was as if the young man had offered him money to make up to him for having, as it were, led him on, and then, perceiving the mistake, but liking him the better for his refusal, had wanted to obliterate this aggravation of his original wrong. He had done so, presently, while Gedge got the door open, by saying the best thing, he could, and by saying it frankly and gaily. "Luckily it doesn't at all affect the _work_!"