"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to return--ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that--" and he saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate again, and if it is unlatched...." "Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't--it's against all my plans." Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road, through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a deserted garden. "You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in a way, fair to him--I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which presumably should be Westboro's secret." "You mean to say,"--the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?" Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their delightful little talks--and they had been so--not once had the name of Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the visitor. "I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your secret--I need not say so--is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns." The sewing she had chosen to finger--a Duchess, and an American one at that, is not expected to do more--lay at her feet. By her side was a basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow. The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly and found great loveliness in her bending face. "I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud. "Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses? Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"