Her hand touched my sleeve for a moment. "Poor old George--always trying to prevent somebody from doing something! Has it ever occurred to you that that's sometimes the way to bring it about?" Then, imperiously, "Has he told you he's in love with her?" "If he is in love with her, and has no eyes for any other woman living, and never will have, will you marry me then?" "Oh, we had all that years ago. Has he told you he's in love with her?" "Since you must know, he has." "Now we're getting at it. I thought you'd something up your sleeve. Now just one more question. Do you happen to know whether he's told _her_ that?" You see what I was in her hands. She cut clean through my web of speculations as scissors go through cloth. I had resolved to tell her this, not to tell her that. The end of it was that I told her precisely what she wished to know. "I've reason for thinking he hasn't," I said. "For one thing, he made me a promise." But she flicked his promise aside as she flicked the convolvulus with her nail. She laughed a little. "Anyway I don't suppose he has the least idea what's the matter with him. He never did know anything about women." But ah, Julia Oliphant, whatever mistakes you made in your life, you never made a greater one than that! Me you might turn this way and that round your finger, but here was something beyond your knowledge and control. I knew what you did not know. I knew what had happened by those softly-illumined cars, by that earth-wall at Le Port gap, and that other night when Fréhel had bidden the Crucifix move and come to life. It was not now he who knew nothing about women, but you who knew nothing about him. I grant you all your other rightness; I grant you that I had drifted and bungled as men do drift and bungle in these things; but here I was right and you hopelessly and irretrievably wrong. He did know about women. Books he had flung aside, pictures he would fling aside, for these were but the dust out of which that loveliest flower bloomed. He did know about women, and all the beauty of his strange destiny had now swung over to Jennie. He had passed with her into the Tower of Oblivion, and Julia and I and the rest of the world for him and her were not.