"You never once--never once thought of it?" I had said huskily at last.
And now, on her knees at my knee by our dying dining-room fire, she asked me if I remembered that evening in Kensington Gardens.
All at once I vowed that I wouldn't stand it--wouldn't stand the intervention of anything on earth, whether of my own making or another's, between us and that first joy. And again, as I held her, I thought of Louie's words. Louie was right--or at least half right. For the present the shadow had passed, but unless I did something now, it would return. Again we should drift apart, and Miss Levey would keep us so. If I did not partly explain, circumstances might do so entirely. Yes, Louie was so far right. If I was to keep the dearest thing on earth to me, I must make a half-truth seem to guarantee the false remainder, and tell Evie of that cruel Kitty Windus episode.
And so I come to my first, though not to my last, attempt to tell without telling, and, as they say, to make my omelette without breaking my eggs.
Her cheek was still against my hand; I looked mournfully down on her. With such a goal it didn't much matter where I began.
"What do you suppose, darling," I began, "Miss Levey's object is in all this?"
Evie's eyes moved to the mantelpiece. It was a bare entablature of black marble, with nothing on it but a small Swiss clock and one or two cabinet photographs--no Arab horsemen. Shyly she glanced from the mantelpiece corner, where the horsemen should have been, to me.
"Yes, she asked to-day whether you'd got it mended," she murmured.
She looked quickly up at my change of tone.
"I want to tell you what her object is. I don't find it easy."
"What do you mean, Jeff?" she asked, strangely abruptly.
"And I'm afraid you won't find it easy either."
She had dropped my hand. "Jeff, what do you mean?"
"I mean that she thinks she's found out--is finding out--something discreditable about me."
At first I did not understand the change, almost to horror, that came into Evie's eyes. Only after a moment almost of fear of what I saw there did I fathom her thought. I don't know how men speak who have an unfaithfulness to confess to their wives, but it flashed on me that Evie actually thought it might be that--so can pure innocence and worldly experience be pierced by the same fear.