"I do not." "Then ask me again and I'll tell you," she threatened him. "I do ask you." Well, if he would have it.... "She's jealous," said Louie. The smile that stole slowly over his face set her almost beside herself. Even Potiphar's wife was probably not smiled at. Louie cut short the easy words that accompanied the smile. "Then if she isn't, why does she want to come and see me at my home?" she demanded. With quite remarkable clumsiness he pretended he had known his wife wanted this, and smiled again. She stamped on the ground. "My good man----" she broke out wildly.... What she said she did not remember very clearly afterwards. It was spoken less to him than to ease her own breast. With nothing to give her, he still could not hold his tongue nor restrain that smile when she told him his wife was jealous. Jealous?... Yes, and with a jealousy that could now never pass away! For, out of absences, silences, refusals, virtues, smiles, everything, Louie had, after all, secured something that all the smiling in the world could not take away. She _had_ the secret he had feared to share with his wife. She _had_ the answer to every riddle in his riddle-haunted eyes. His wife _had_ grounds for her jealousy, after all, had she but wit enough to know where to look for them. But she too was hopelessly behind. She too was smelling at cold scents--telephones and visits to flats. She suspected a gross infidelity, and never dreamed of the existence of one so fatally searching that the other would have been a mere incident by comparison with it. Little dullard, how should she? Her conception even of jealousy was as limited as everything else about her; a call or two on the private wire at night, and she was found asking questions at the Consolidation the next day. And suddenly Louie saw--fool that she had been not to see it before!--why Evie Jeffries wanted to come to her flat. It was not to see the place and its furniture. It was to see Jimmy. Oh, if her boy could only have had eyes like a young lion! VI When Kitty Windus had come to Mortlake Road and had refused to sit down until Louie had told her the truth about the wanton slander that had linked her name with Jim's, Louie had dismissed the matter with amused contempt. But now there seemed something rather terrible in it. Its author's stamping-out notwithstanding, for Evie Jeffries it appeared still to live. What had brought it up anew Louie could not as much as guess, but there it seemed to be.