‘That Kandore will buy it to put in one bonfire first,’ he assured me, and I sincerely hoped for his sake that it would be the case.
‘Of course it’s understood,’ I bethought me to say, ‘that I get it, if I do get it, at Mr. Armour’s price. I’m not a Maharajah, you know, and it isn’t a portrait of me.’
‘Of course!’ said Kauffer, ‘but I sink I sell you that Porcha; it is ze best of ze two.’
I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed for me upon Armour’s affairs to myself. The whole thing considered in connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too derogatory and disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury in the mere statement. But there came a point when I could no longer listen to Dora Harris’s theories to account for him, wild idealizations as most of them were of any man’s circumstances and intentions. ‘Why don’t you ask him point-blank?’ I said, and she replied, frowning slightly, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. It would destroy something--I don’t know what, but something valuable--between us.’ This struck me as an exaggeration, considering how far, by that time, they must have progressed towards intimacy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The touch of comedy I gave the whole thing--surely I was justified in that!--fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of rebuke; one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor devil.
At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she turned a calm, considering eye upon me.
‘You have known this for a fortnight?’ she asked. ‘That doesn’t seem somehow quite fair.’
‘To whom?’ I asked, and her answer startled me.
How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine, but the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.
‘Oh, confound it!’ I exclaimed. ‘I couldn’t help finding out, you know.’
‘But you could help keeping it to yourself in that--in that base way,’ she replied, and almost--the evening light was beginning to glimmer uncertainly through the deodars--I could swear I saw the flash of a tear on her eyelid.