Fay raised her face out of her hands, and stared at him.
"It's the only thing I've ever known him really wish for, almost keen about. He can't care much about things, not as other men care. He has always waited to see whether things will come to him of themselves, and then if they didn't he thought it was a wise Providence taking them away, showing him the vanity of setting his heart on anything, while all the time it's his own nature really that makes things somehow slip away from him. People slip away from him. I've seen it happen over and over again. He can't take hold like other men. He does not put himself out for any one, you know, and he doesn't realise that other people _do_; he has no idea how men like the Bishop and Grenfell and the Archbishop stand by each other, and hold together through thick and thin. Wentworth has no friends, but he doesn't know it. He has only you and me. The Bishop said we must remember that, and that if--anything happened to shake his--his feeling for either of us, his belief in either of us, it would be cruelly hard on him."
"Why should anything happen," said Fay faintly, "if you don't tell him?"
"I shan't tell him on purpose, you may be sure of that, but since--since the Bishop came over I'm certain he suspects something, I don't know what, and I have to be careful all the time. Fay, I've grown so stupid and muddle-headed since I've been in--in _Italy_ that I _can't_ remember what I may say and what I mayn't about that time. My only safety is in absolute silence, and lately that has begun to vex him. And he asks such odd questions, which I don't see the meaning of at first, like traps. He often tells me he never asks any questions, but he does, indirect ones, all the time. I'm getting afraid of being alone with him. Sometimes I think if I stay much longer at Barford I'm so idiotic he'll get it out of me. Has he asked you any leading questions?"
"No. Once he asked if you showed any gratitude for what I had done for you in the past. And I said no. It was the first time I had told him a lie, for it was a lie except in the actual words."
"Aren't you afraid," said Michael gently, "that it may not be the only one, that perhaps there may be some more?"