"He never said a word. The handshaking was my own brilliant idea. When I found--what I did find out--I went away and had a good cry in mamma's room." This speech was an effort on Gwen's part to get a little nearer--ever so little--to Marcus Curtius; nearer, that is, to her metaphorical parallel of his heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her "good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases of special licence, or pass current merely under _chaperonage_? No--she was safe so far certainly.
"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a tone of real distress. "Why--why--should I make you miserable and lay you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune.... Well--I _have_ been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as merry as a grig...."
"_I_ may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression 'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."
"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has waned again perceptibly.
"Why--suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"
"Lady Gwendolen, you don't understand the nature of an hypothesis"--his absurdity gets the upper hand again--"the nature of an hypothesis is that its maker is always in the right. I am, this time. If I had been nursed round at the Mackworth Clarkes', you would have known nothing about me except as a mere accident--a person in the papers--a person one inquires after...."