"There isn't any use in lying to you. You wouldn't believe. You would only go to some one else--some woman probably,--who would jump at the chance of telling you everything and a deal more. Yes, there are a great many 'they _do_ say's' floating about. This was the only one that came near being--serious. The man was very clever.--Oh, he wasn't vulgarly lecherous. He was simply--Jack Charteris. He always irritated Lichfield, though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously. You would hear every by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present state of mind you would believe all of them. I happen to know that a great many of these stories are not true." "A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without a trace of bitterness. "I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at, is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you." Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion, true. "There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a mistake for us to emphasize the culvert." So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now. It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more. "I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with bright amazement in her eyes. "Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And he parodied an actor's motion in this rôle. She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so, "You haven't _any_ sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't." "My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."