He was obliged to hang fire but a moment longer--it was like that question of her portrait in his pocket. He hadn't been sure of that, but the miniature was nevertheless there. Her letters weren't secreted about his person of course, but where would they be else than at the bottom of that box at his inn? "If you can prove one of them missing," he was thus in twenty seconds ready to answer, "I'll chew the rest of 'em up and swallow 'em, red tape and all." "Have you tied mine with red tape?" Mrs. Midmore asked in full amusement. The pleasure of being certain when he could be certain was, he rejoiced to note, as great to him as ever. "We don't deal in that article as much in America, no doubt, as you do here, but one always takes it, you know, for binding--and if I'm bound with pink ribbon," he said to Molly, "I'll have you understand that _you're_ tied, my dear, as the lawyers tie up deeds and contracts. So that's the way," he laughed, "I hold you to your bargain." With which indeed, however, he had but to hear the elder lady enrich the air with her assurance that their bargain was the best witnessed as well as the fairest she had ever had to do with, in order to feel anew that pinch of conscience, as he could only have called it, which he had a few minutes before too insufficiently soothed. He might really have been telling lies within these later instants--by the measure, that is, of his recurrent wish to establish his innocence of the other recognition. His need in this connection withal was to be clearest to Mrs. Midmore. "Ten times on the voyage did I read them all over, and in fact if she dares to doubt of it I'll repeat every word of 'em before you and her brother--which is a threat, my love, that I think will keep you quiet," he gaily continued to the girl herself. And he had on it an extraordinary further inspiration--so far as one such was more extraordinary than another, and so far as what was now before him, for instance, was more so than that quick vividness, just recorded, of his sense, his positive exact vision, of the red-taped packets in the portmanteau. "I have them by heart with the funny spelling and all; and if our company only hear, without seeing, your sweetest passages, my dear, they won't know, they won't know----!" "That I did once write 'affection' with one 'f', you mean?" Molly broke in with so little resentment as to convert into light banter on his part a stretch of allusion which he had risked with a slight fear of excess. "You'll find also when you look again that I once spelled 'frightful' _ite_--I remembered it after my letter had gone. And I remember something else too--which, however, I'll not confess to before them."