It was nevertheless not at once that he sought out the way to find his
old friend; other questions than that of at once seeing her hummed for
the next half-hour about his ears--an interval spent by him in still
further contemplative motion within his uncle's grounds. He strolled and
stopped again and stared before him without seeing; he came and went and
sat down on benches and low rocky ledges only to get up and pace afresh;
he lighted cigarettes but to smoke them a quarter out and then chuck
them away to light others. He said to himself that he was enormously
agitated, agitated as never in his life before, but that, strangely
enough, he disliked that condition far less than the menace of it would
have made him suppose. He didn't, however, like it enough to say to
himself "This is happiness!"--as could scarcely have failed if the kind
of effect on his nerves had really consorted with the kind of advantage
that he was to understand his interview with his uncle to have promised
him; so far, that is, as he was yet to understand anything. His
after-sense of the scene expanded rather than settled, became an
impression of one of those great insistent bounties that are not of this
troubled world; the anomaly expressing itself in such beauty and
dignity, with all its elements conspiring together, as would have done
honour to a great page of literary, of musical or pictorial art. The
huge grace of the matter ought somehow to have left him simply
captivated--so at least, all wondering, he hung about there to reflect;
but excess of harmony might apparently work like excess of discord,
might practically be a negation of the idea of the quiet life. Ignoble
quiet he had never asked for--this he could now with assurance remember;
but something in the pitch of his uncle's guarantee of big things,
whatever they were, which should at the same time be pleasant things,
seemed to make him an accomplice in some boundless presumption. In what
light had he ever seen himself that made it proper the pleasant should
be so big for him or the big so pleasant? Suddenly, as he looked at his
watch and saw how the time had passed--time already, didn't it seem, of
his rather standing off and quaking?--it occurred to him that the last
thing he had proposed to himself in the whole connection was to be
either publicly or privately afraid; in the act of noting which he
became aware again of Miss Mumby, who, having come out of the house
apparently to approach him, was now at no great distance. She rose
before him the next minute as in fuller possession than ever of his
fate, and yet with no accretion of reserve in her own pleasure at this.
"What I want you to do is just to go over to Miss Gaw."
"It's just what _I_ should like, thank you--and perhaps you'll be so
good as to show me the way." He wasn't quite succeeding in not being
afraid--that a moment later came to him; since if this extraordinary
woman was in touch with his destiny what did such words on his own part
represent but the impulse to cling to her and, as who should say, keep
on her right side? His uncle had spoken to him of Rosanna as
protective--and what better warrant for such a truth than that here was
he thankful on the spot even for the countenance of a person speaking
apparently in her name? All of which was queer enough, verily--since it
came to the sense of his clutching for immediate light, through the now
gathered dusk, at the surge of guiding petticoats, the charity of women
more or less strange. Miss Mumby at once took charge of him, and he
learnt more things still before they had proceeded far. One of these
truths, though doubtless the most superficial, was that Miss Gaw
proposed he should dine with her just as he was--he himself recognising
that with her father suddenly and to all appearance gravely ill it was
no time for vain forms. Wasn't the rather odd thing, none the less, that
the crisis should have suggested her desiring company?--being as it was
so acute that the doctor, Doctor Hatch himself, would even now have
arrived with a nurse, both of which pair of ears Miss Mumby required for
her report of those symptoms in their new patient that had appealed to
her practised eye an hour before. Interesting enough withal was her
explanation to Gray of what she had noted on Mr. Gaw's part as a
consequence of her joining them at that moment under Mr. Betterman's
roof; all the more that he himself had then wondered and
surmised--struck as he was with the effect on the poor man's nerves of
their visitor's announcement that her prime patient had brightened. Mr.
Gaw but too truly, our young man now learned, had taken that news
ill--as, given the state of his heart, any strong shock might determine
a bad aggravation. Such a shock Miss Mumby had, to her lively regret,
administered, though she called Gray's attention to the prompt and
intelligent action of her remorse. Feeling at once responsible she had
taken their extraordinary little subject in charge--with every care
indeed not to alarm him; to the point that, on his absolute refusal to
let her go home with him and his arresting a hack, on the public road,
which happened to come into view empty, the two had entered the vehicle
and she had not lost sight of him till, his earnest call upon his
daughter at Mrs. Bradham's achieved, he had been in effect restored to
his own house. His daughter, who lived with her eyes on his liability to
lapses, was now watching with him, and was well aware, Miss Mumby
averred, of what the crisis might mean; as to whose own due presence of
mind in the connection indeed how could there be better proof than this
present lucidity of her appeal to Mr. Betterman's guest on such a matter
as her prompt thought for sparing him delay?
"If she didn't want you to wait to dress, it can only be, I guess, to
make sure of seeing you before anything happens," his guide was at no
loss to remark; "and if she _can_ mention dinner while the old gentleman
is--well, _as_ he is--it shows she's not too beside herself to feel that
you'll at any rate want yours."
"Oh for mercy's sake don't talk of dinner!" Gray pulled up under the
influence of these revelations quite impatiently to request. "That's not
what I'm most thinking of, I beg you to believe, in the midst of such
prodigies and portents." They had crossed the small stretch of road
which separated Mr. Betterman's gate from that of the residence they
were addressed to; and now, within the grounds of this latter, which
loomed there, through vague boskages, with an effect of windows
numerously and precipitately lighted, the forces of our young friend's
consciousness were all in vibration at once. "My wondrous uncle, I don't
mind telling you, since you're so kind to me, has given me more
extraordinary things to think of than I see myself prepared in any way
to do justice to; and if I'm further to understand you that we have
between us, you and I, destroyed this valuable life, I leave you to
judge whether what we may have to face in consequence finds me eager."
"How do you know it's such a valuable life?" Miss Mumby surprisingly
rejoined; sinking that question, however, in a livelier interest, before
his surprise could express itself. "If she has sent me for you it's
because she knows what she's about, and because I also know what I
am--so that, wanting you myself so much to come, I guess I'd have gone
over for you on my own responsibility. Why, Mr. Fielder, your place is
right here _by_ her at such a time as this, and if you don't already
realise it I'm very glad I've helped you."
Such was the consecration under which, but a few minutes later, Gray
found himself turning about in the lamp-lit saloon of the Gaws very much
as he had a few hours before revolved at the other house. Miss Mumby had
introduced him into this apartment straight from the terrace to which,
in the warm air, a long window or two stood open, and then had left him
with the assurance that matters upstairs would now be in shape for their
friend to join him at once. It was perhaps because he had rather
inevitably expected matters upstairs--and this in spite of his late
companion's warning word--to assault him in some fulness with Miss Gaw's
appearance at the door, that a certain failure of any such effect when
she did appear had for him a force, even if it was hardly yet to be
called a sense, beyond any air of her advancing on the tide of pain. He
fairly took in, face to face with her, that what she first called for
was no rattle of sound, however considerately pitched, about the
question of her own fear; she had pulled no long face, she cared for no
dismal deference: she but stood there, after she had closed the door
with a backward push that took no account, in the hushed house, of some
possible resonance, she but stood there smiling in her mild extravagance
of majesty, smiling and smiling as he had seen women do as a preface to
bursting into tears. He was to remember afterwards how he had felt for
an instant that whatever he said or did would deprive her of resistance
to an inward pressure which was growing as by the sight of him, but that
she would thus break down much more under the crowned than under the
menaced moment--thanks to which appearance what could be stranger than
his inviting her to clap her hands? Still again was he later to recall
that these hands had been the moment after held in his own while he knew
himself smiling too and saying: "Well, well, well, what wonders and what
splendours!" and seeing that though there was even more of her in
presence than he had reckoned there was somehow less of her in time; as
if she had at once grown and grown and grown, grown in all sorts of ways
save the most natural one of growing visibly older. Such an oddity as
that made her another person a good deal more than her show of not
having left him behind by any break with their common youth could keep
her the same.
These perceptions took of course but seconds, with yet another on their
heels, to the effect that she had already seen him, and seen him to some
fine sense of pleasure, as himself enormously different--arriving at
that clearness before they had done more than thus waver between the
"fun," all so natural, of their meeting as the frankest of friends and
the quite other intelligence of their being parties to a crisis. It was
to remain on record for him too, and however over-scored, that their
crisis, surging up for three or four minutes by its essential force,
suffered them to stand there, with irrelevant words and motions, very
much as if it were all theirs alone and nobody's else, nobody's more
important, on either side, than they were, and so take a brush from the
wing of personal romance. He let her hands go, and then, if he wasn't
mistaken, held them afresh a moment in repeated celebration, he
exchanged with her the commonest remarks and the flattest and the
easiest, so long as it wasn't speaking but seeing, and seeing more and
more, that mattered: they literally talked of his journey and his
arrival and of whether he had had a good voyage and wasn't tired; they
said "You sit here, won't you?" and "Shan't you be better there?"--they
said "Oh I'm all right!" and "Fancy it's happening after all like this!"
before there even faintly quavered the call of a deeper note. This was
really because the deep one, from minute to minute, was that acute hush
of her so clearly finding him not a bit what she might have built up. He
had grown and grown just as she had, certainly; only here he was for her
clothed in the right interest of it, not bare of that grace as he
fancied her guessing herself in his eyes, and with the conviction
sharply thrust upon him, beyond any humour he might have cultivated,
that he was going to be so right for her and so predetermined, whatever
he did and however he should react there under conditions incalculable,
that this would perhaps more overload his consciousness than ease it. It
could have been further taken for strange, had there been somebody so to
note it, that even when their first vaguenesses dropped what she really
at once made easiest for him was to tell her that _the_ wonderful thing
had come to pass, the thing she had whisked him over for--he put it to
her that way; that it had taken place in conditions too exquisite to be
believed, and that under the bewilderment produced by these she must
regard him as still staggering.
"Then it's done, then it's done--as I knew it would be if he could but
see you." Flushed, but with her large fan held up so that scarce more
than her eyes, their lids drawn together in the same nearsighted way he
remembered, presented themselves over it, she fairly hunched her high
shoulders higher for emphasis of her success. The more it might have
embarrassed her to consider him without reserve the more she had this
relief, as he took it, of her natural, her helpful blinking; so that
what it came to really for her general advantage was that the fine
closing of the eyes, _the_ fine thing in her big face, but expressed
effective scrutiny. Below her in stature--as various other men, for that
matter, couldn't but be--he hardly came higher than her ear; and he for
the shade of an instant struck himself as a small boy, literally not of
man's estate, reporting, under some research, just to the amplest of
mothers. He had reported to Mr. Betterman, so far as intent candour in
him hadn't found itself distraught, and for the half hour had somehow
affronted the immeasurable; but that didn't at all prevent his now quick
sense of his never in his life having been so watched and waited upon by
the uncharted infinite, or so subject to its operation--since
infinities, at the rate he was sinking in, _could_ apparently operate,
and do it too without growing smaller for the purpose. He cast about,
not at all upright on the small pink satin sofa to which he had
unconsciously dropped; it was for _him_ clearly to grow bigger, as
everything about expressively smiled, smiled absolutely through the
shadow cast by doctors and nurses again, in suggestion of; which,
naturally, was what one would always want to do--but which any failure
of, he after certain moments perfectly felt, wouldn't convert to the
least difference for this friend. How could that have been more
established than by her neglect of his having presently said, out of his
particular need, that he would do anything in reason that was asked of
him, but that he fairly ached with the desire to understand----? She
blinked upon his ache to her own sufficiency, no doubt; but no further
balm dropped upon it for the moment than by her appearing to brood with
still deeper assurance, in her place and her posture, on the beauty of
the accomplished fact, the fact of her performed purpose and her freedom
now but to take care--yes, herself take care--for what would come of it.
She might understand that _he_ didn't--all the way as yet; but nothing
could be more in the line of the mild and mighty mother than her
treating that as a trifle. It attenuated a little perhaps, it just let
light into the dark warmth of her spreading possession of what she had
done, that when he had said, as a thing already ten times on his lips
and now quite having to come out, "I feel some big mistake about me
somehow at work, and want to stop it in time!" she met this with the
almost rude decision of "There's nothing you can stop now, Graham, for
your fate, or our situation, has the gained momentum of a rush that
began ever so far away and that has been growing and growing. It would
be too late even if we wanted to--and you can judge for yourself how
little that's my wish. So here we are, you see, to make the best of it."
"When you talk of my 'fate,'" he allowed himself almost the amusement of
answering, "you freeze the current of my blood; but when you say 'our
situation,' and that we're in it together, that's a little better, and I
assure you that I shall not for a moment stay in anything, whatever it
may be, in which you're not close beside me. So there you are at any
rate--and I matter at least as much as this, whatever the mistake: that
I have hold of you as tight as ever you've been held in your life, and
that, whatever and _whatever_ the mistake, you've got to see me
through."
"Well, I took my responsibility years ago, and things came of it"--so
she made reply; "and the other day I took this other, and now _this_ has
come of it, and that was what I wanted, and wasn't afraid of, and am not
afraid of now--like the fears that came to me after the Dresden time."
No more direct than that was her answer to his protest, and what she
subjoined still took as little account of it. "I rather lost them, those
old fears--little by little; but one of the things I most wanted the
other day was to see whether before you here they wouldn't wholly die
down. They're over, they're over," she repeated; "I knew three minutes
of you would do it--and not a ghost of them remains."
"I can't be anything but glad that you shouldn't have fears--and it's
horrid to me to learn, I assure you," he said, "that I've ever been the
occasion of any. But the extent to which," he then frankly laughed,
"'three minutes' of me seems to be enough for people----!"
He left it there, just throwing up his arms, passive again as he had
accepted his having to be in the other place; but conscious more and
more of the anomaly of her showing so markedly at such an hour a
preoccupation, and of the very intensest, that should not have her
father for its subject. Nothing could have more represented this than
her abruptly saying to him, without recognition of his point just made,
so far as it might have been a point: "If your impression of your uncle,
and of his looking so fine and being so able to talk to you, makes you
think he has any power really to pick up or to last, I want you to know
that you're wholly mistaken. It has kept him up," she went on, "and the
effect may continue a day or two more--it _will_, in fact, till certain
things are done. But then the flicker will have dropped--for he won't
want it not to. He'll feel all right. The extraordinary inspiration, the
borrowed force, will have spent itself--it will die down and go out, but
with no pain. There has been at no time much of that," she said, "and
now I'm positively assured there's none. It can't come back--nothing can
but the weakness. It's too lovely," she remarkably added--"so there
indeed and indeed we are."
To take in these words was to be, after a fashion he couldn't have
expressed, on a basis of reality with her the very rarest and queerest;
so that, bristling as it did with penetrative points, her speech left
him scarce knowing for the instant which penetrated furthest. That she
made no more of anything he himself said than if she had just sniffed it
as a pale pink rose and then tossed it into the heap of his other sweet
futilities, such another heap as had seemed to grow up for him in his
uncle's room, this might have pressed sharpest hadn't something else,
not wholly overscored by what followed, perhaps pricked his
consciousness most. "'It,' you say, has kept him up? May I ask you what
'it' then may so wonderfully have been?"
She had no more objection to say than she apparently had difficulty.
"Why, his having let me get at him. _That_ was to make the whole
difference."
It was somehow as much in the note of their reality as anything could
well be; which was perhaps why he could but respond with "Oh I see!" and
remain lolling a little with a sense of flatness--a flatness moreover
exclusively his own.
So without flatness of _her_ own she didn't even mind his; something in
her brushed quite above it while she observed next, as if it were the
most important thing that now occurred to her: "That of course was my
poor father's mistake." And then as Gray but stared: "I mean the idea
that he _can_ pick up."
"It's your father's mistake that _he_ can----?"
She met it as if really a shade bewildered at his own misconception; she
was literally so far off from any vision of her parent in himself, a
philosopher might have said, that it took her an instant to do the
question justice. "Oh no--I mean that your uncle can. It was your own
report of that to him, with Miss Mumby backing you, that put things in
the bad light to him."
"So bad a light that Mr. Gaw is in danger by it?" This was catching on
of a truth to realities--and most of all to the one he had most to face.
"I've been then at the bottom of that?"
He was to wonder afterwards if she had very actually gone so far as to
let slip a dim smile for the intensity of his candour on this point, or
whether her so striking freedom from intensity in the general connection
had but suggested to him one of the images that were most in opposition.
Her answer at any rate couldn't have had more of the eminence of her
plainness. "That you yourself, after your uncertainties, should have
found Mr. Betterman surprising was perfectly natural--and how indeed
could you have dreamed that father so wanted him to die?" And then as
Gray, affected by the extreme salience of this link in the chain of her
logic, threw up his head a little for the catching of his breath, her
supreme lucidity, and which was lucidity all in his interest, further
shone out. "Father is indeed ill. He has had these bad times before, but
nothing quite of the present gravity. He has been in a critical state
for months, but one thing has kept him alive--the wish to see your uncle
so far on his way that there could be no doubt. It was the appearance of
doubt so suddenly this afternoon that gave him the shock." She continued
to explain the case without prejudice. "To take it there from you for
possible that Mr. Betterman might revive and that he should have in his
own so unsteady condition to wait was simply what father couldn't
stand."
"So that I just dealt the blow----?"
But it was as if she cared too little even to try to make that right.
"He doesn't want, you see, to live after."
"After having found he is mistaken?"
She had a faint impatience. "He isn't of course really--since what I
told you of your uncle is true. And he knows that now, having my word
for it."
Gray couldn't be clear enough about her clearness. "Your word for it
that my uncle has revived but for the moment?"
"Absolutely. Wasn't my giving him that," Rosanna asked, "a charming
filial touch?"
This was tremendously much again to take in, but Gray's capacity grew.
"Promising him, you mean, for his benefit, that my uncle _shan't_ last?"
The size of it on his lips might fairly, during the instant she looked
at him, have been giving her pleasure. "Yes, making it a bribe to
father's patience."
"Then why doesn't the bribe act?"
"Because it comes too late. It was amazing," she pursued, "that, feeling
as he did, he could take that drive to the Bradhams'--and Miss Mumby was
right in perfectly understanding that. The harm was already done--and
there it is."
She had truly for the whole reference the most astounding tones. "You
literally mean then," said Gray, "that while you sit here with me he's
dying--dying of my want of sense?"
"You've no want of sense"--she spoke as if this were the point really
involved. "You've a sense the most exquisite--and surely you had best
take in soon rather than late," she went on, "how you'll never be free
not to have on every occasion of life to reckon with it and pay for it."
"Oh I say!" was all the wit with which he could at once meet this
charge; but she had risen as she spoke and, with a remark about there
being another matter, had moved off to a piece of furniture at a
distance where she appeared to take something from a drawer unlocked
with a sharp snap for the purpose. When she returned to him she had this
object in her hand, and Gray recognised in it an oblong envelope,
addressed, largely sealed in black, and seeming to contain a voluminous
letter. She kept it while he noted that the seal was intact, and she
then reverted not to the discomfiture she had last produced in him but
to his rueful reference of a minute before that.
"He's not dying of anything you said or did, or of anyone's act or
words. He's just dying of twenty millions."
"Twenty millions?" There was a kind of enormity in her very absence of
pomp, and Gray felt as if he had dropped of a sudden, from his height of
simplicity, far down into a familiar relation to quantities
inconceivable--out of which depths he fairly blew and splashed to
emerge, the familiar relation, of all things in the world, being so
strange a one. "_That's_ what you mean here when you talk of money?"
"That's what we mean," said Rosanna, "when we talk of anything at
all--for of what else but money _do_ we ever talk? He's dying, at any
rate," she explained, "of his having wished to have to do with it on
that sort of scale. Having to do with it consists, you know, of the
things you do _for_ it--which are mostly very awful; and there are all
kinds of consequences that they eventually have. You pay by these
consequences for what you have done, and my father has been for a long
time paying." Then she added as if of a sudden to summarise and dismiss
the whole ugly truth: "The effect has been to dry up his life." Her
eyes, with this, reached away for the first time as in search of
something not at all before her, and it was on the perfunctory note that
she had the next instant concluded. "There's nothing at last left for
him to pay _with._"
For Gray at least, whatever initiations he had missed, she couldn't keep
down the interest. "Mr. Gaw then will _leave_ twenty millions----?"
"He has already left them--in the sense of having made his will; as your
uncle, equally to my knowledge, has already made his." Something visibly
had occurred to her, and in connection, it might seem, with the packet
she had taken from her drawer. She looked about--there being within the
scene, which was somehow at once blank and replete, sundry small
scattered objects of an expensive negligibility; not one of which, till
now, he could guess, had struck her as a thing of human application.
Human application had sprung up, the idea of selection at once
following, and she unmistakeably but wondered what would be best for her
use while she completed the statement on which she had so strikingly
embarked. "He has left me his whole fortune." Then holding up an article
of which she had immediately afterwards, with decision, proceeded to
possess herself, "Is that a thing you could at all bear?" she
irrelevantly asked. She had caught sight, in her embarrassed way, of
something apparently adapted to her unexplained end, and had left him
afresh to assure herself of its identity, taking up from a table at
first, however, a box in Japanese lacquer only to lay it down
unsatisfied. She had circled thus at a distance for a time, allowing him
now his free contemplation; she had tried in succession, holding them
close to her eyes, several embossed or embroidered superfluities, a
blotting-book covered with knobs of malachite, a silver box, flat,
largely circular and finely fretted, a gold cigar case of absurd
dimensions, of which she played for a moment the hinged lid. Such was
the object on which she puzzlingly challenged him.
"I could bear it perhaps better if I ever used cigars."
"You don't smoke?" she almost wailed.
"Never cigars. Sometimes pipes--but mostly, thank goodness, cigarettes."
"Thank the powers then indeed!"--and, the golden case restored to the
table, where she had also a moment before laid her prepared missive, she
went straight to a corner of the mantel-shelf, hesitations dropping from
her, and, opening there a plainer receptacle than any she had yet
touched, turned the next instant with a brace of cigarettes picked out
and an accent she had not yet used. "You _are_ a blessing, Gray--I'm
nowhere without one!" There were matches at hand, and she had struck a
light and applied it, at his lips, to the cigarette passively received
by him, afterwards touching her own with it, almost before he could
wonder again at the oddity of their transition. Their light smoke curled
while she went back to her table; it quickened for him with each puff
the marvel of a domestic altar graced at such a moment by the play of
that particular flame. Almost, to his fine vision, it made Rosanna
different--for wasn't there at once a gained ease in the tone with
which, her sealed letter still left lying on the table, she returned to
that convenience for the pocket of the rich person of which she had
clicked and re-clicked the cover? What strange things, Gray thought,
rich persons had!--and what strange things they did, he might mentally
even have added, when she developed in a way that mystified him but the
more: "I don't mean for your cigars, since you don't use them; but I
want you to have from my hand something in which to keep, with all due
consideration, a form of tribute that has been these last forty-eight
hours awaiting you here, and which, it occurs to me, would just slide
into this preposterous piece of furniture and nestle there till you may
seem to feel you want it." She proceeded to recover the packet and slide
it into the case, the shape of which, on a larger scale, just
corresponded with its own, and then, once more making the lid catch,
shook container and contents as sharply as she might have shaken a
bottle of medicine. "So--there it is; I somehow don't want just to
thrust at you the letter itself."
"But may I be told what the letter itself _is?_" asked Gray, who had
followed these movements with interest.
"Why of course--didn't I mention? Here are safely stowed," she said, her
gesture causing the smooth protective surfaces to twinkle more brightly
before him, "the very last lines (and many there appear to be of them!)
that, if I am not mistaken, my father's hand will have traced. He wrote
them, in your interest, as he considers, when he heard of your arrival
in New York, and, having sealed and directed them, gave them to me
yesterday to take care of and deliver to you. I put them away for the
purpose, and an hour ago, during our drive back from Mrs. Bradham's, he
reminded me of my charge. Before asking Miss Mumby to tell you I should
like to see you I transferred the letter from its place of safety in my
room to the cabinet from which, for your benefit, I a moment ago took
it. I carefully comply, as you see, with my father's request. I know
nothing whatever of what he has written you, and only want you to have
his words. But I want also," she pursued, "to make just this little
affair of them. I want"--and she bent her eyes on the queer costliness,
rubbing it with her pockethandkerchief--"to do what the Lord Mayor of
London does, doesn't he? when he offers the Freedom of the City; present
them in a precious casket in which they may always abide. I want in
short," she wound up, "to put them, for your use, beautifully away."
Gray went from wonder to wonder. "It isn't then a thing you judge I
should open at once?"
"I don't care whether you never open it in your life. But you don't, I
can see, like that vulgar thing!" With which having opened her
receptacle and drawn forth from it the subject of her attention she
tossed back to its place on the spread of brocade the former of these
trifles. The big black seal, under this discrimination, seemed to fix
our young man with a sombre eye.
"Is there any objection to my just looking at the letter now?" And then
when he had taken it and yet was on the instant and as by the mere feel
and the nearer sight, rather less than more conscious of a free
connection with it, "Is it going to be bad for me?" he said.
"Find out for yourself!"
"Break the seal?"
"Isn't it meant to break?" she asked with a shade of impatience.
He noted the impatience, sounding her nervousness, but saw at the same
time that her interest in the communication, whatever it might be, was
of the scantest, and that she suffered from having to defer to his own.
"If I needn't answer tonight----!"
"You needn't answer ever."
"Oh well then it can wait. But you're right--it mustn't just wait in my
pocket."