"Good Heavens! Ermengarde," cried Arthur, the expression of whose face had undergone a variety of changes, mostly merging into one of stupefaction, during this address, "what can you mean? What can you have taken into your head? What on earth do you mean by faithless?" "What," she cried, losing her head suddenly, and throwing prudence and pride to the winds, though still adhering to the Socratic method--"what did you mean by that scene in your study, the night I came home early with a headache from my mother's, and looked in?" "Scene in my study? There was never any scene in my study. What night are you talking of? Look into my study whenever you like, and you'll see nothing there but a man working or smoking, or both." At this the Socratic method went by the board as well as pride and prudence. "The night--after--after--you had been so unkik-kik-kind about my ha-ha-hats and gug-gug-gug-going abroad," she gasped, "the night the--the woman was there--cry-crying--and being com-com-comforted?" "Woman crying?" he muttered, puzzled. "Women don't come and cry in my study. What on earth have you been imagining? Women don't come--except, of course, the secretary--at all. You can't mean Miss Scott? By George, now I come to think of it, she did come and cry there once, poor girl. And of course, I tried to comfort her." "Oh, _of course_!" "Ermengarde! How can you?" "How coo-coo-coo-could _you_?" "Really one might almost suppose you had lowered yourself to some vulgar suspicions----" They had now arrived by slow degrees, and after various stops and turns to emphasize rhetoric, at a place where the top of the ridge widened, and the path ran between pine-woods clothing the side of the ravine, that here sloped steeply instead of falling perpendicularly. "You were, at any rate, landed in a most _compromising situation_," she broke in, recovering her calm, "_a nice predicament_," she added, stepping from the path into the wood among aromatic undergrowth and tall white heath. "And when that predicament is satisfactorily explained, it will be time----" "You poor little fool!" he cried, suddenly turning, taking both her hands and looking straight into her eyes, "you must have been off your head----" "Arthur, how dare you!" "Regularly off your head to stoop to such miserable suspicions----" She wrenched her hands away. "I, at least, never spied on you. I had no wish to verify any suspicions--I had seen more than enough," she said scornfully. "You could have falsified them at once with one question?" "I--I couldn't--stoop--to that," she wept.