Those truer tidings than any words of hers could give expression to had come from the lips that had not even sought to avoid mine. Sought to avoid them? I call the first star that peeped through the laurels to witness the handful of dust that friendship of ours had become. Speech? Language? She used neither; to me in that moment she _was_ both speech and language--vocal flesh, her very hair and eyes an utterance. You will not ask me an utterance of what; I take my chance of being understood in the light of what Woman is to you. Make her what you will: a riddle herself--or the answer to the deepest enigma of the soul; as much earth as a man's hard hands must needs be filled with--or as much spirit as he can bear until he himself is all spirit; a lovely casket--yet not too lovely for the scroll of the Freedom it contains. Have it your own way. I only know that if she spoke thus I heard as if my whole body had been one attuned and exquisite nerve. We had drawn a little deeper into the laurels.... Again we kissed.... And in my heart there had been jealousy of no man, dead or living. That dead young man had awakened her from sleep, but I had made her mine with her eyes wide open. He had taken her by surprise, but me she had chosen. And as our lips had met once more, I had known that she loved even the pain I caused her in straining her in my arms. "You never once--never once thought of it?" I had said huskily at last. "Dear--dear! How _was_ I to?" "Kiss me--kiss me----" And now, on her knees at my knee by our dying dining-room fire, she asked me if I remembered that evening in Kensington Gardens. All at once I vowed that I wouldn't stand it--wouldn't stand the intervention of anything on earth, whether of my own making or another's, between us and that first joy. And again, as I held her, I thought of Louie's words. Louie was right--or at least half right. For the present the shadow had passed, but unless I did something now, it would return. Again we should drift apart, and Miss Levey would keep us so. If I did not partly explain, circumstances might do so entirely. Yes, Louie was so far right. If I was to keep the dearest thing on earth to me, I must make a half-truth seem to guarantee the false remainder, and tell Evie of that cruel Kitty Windus episode. And so I come to my first, though not to my last, attempt to tell without telling, and, as they say, to make my omelette without breaking my eggs. Her cheek was still against my hand; I looked mournfully down on her. With such a goal it didn't much matter where I began. "What do you suppose, darling," I began, "Miss Levey's object is in all this?" Evie's eyes moved to the mantelpiece. It was a bare entablature of black marble, with nothing on it but a small Swiss clock and one or two cabinet photographs--no Arab horsemen. Shyly she glanced from the mantelpiece corner, where the horsemen should have been, to me. "Yes, she asked to-day whether you'd got it mended," she murmured.