With one more look, another slightest shrug, Harry Belfield turned his back on them. They stood without moving till the door closed behind him.
He was gone. Andy gave a deep sigh and dropped into the arm-chair by his office desk. Vivien bent over him, her hand on his shoulder.
"Why did you let me meet him, Andy?"
Andy was long in answering. He was revolving the processes of his own mind, the impulse under which he had acted, why he had exposed her to such an ordeal as had once been in the day's work at Nutley.
"It was a chance, your coming while he was here, we three being here together. But since it happened like that"—he raised his eyes to hers—"well, I just thought that neither of us ought to funk him." The utterance seemed a simple result of so much cogitation.
But Vivien laughed softly as she daintily and daringly laid her hand on Andy's big head.
"If I 'funked him' still, I shouldn't have come at all," she said. "I think I'm just getting to know something about you, Andy. You're like some big thing in a dim light; one only sees you very gradually. I used to think of you as fetching and carrying, you know."
Andy chuckled contentedly. "You thought about right," he said. "That's what I'm always doing, just what I'm fit for. I shall go on doing it all my life, fetching and carrying for you."
"Not only for me, I think. For everybody; perhaps even for the nation—for the world, Andy!"
He caught the little hand that was playing over his broad brow. "For you first. As for the rest of it—!" He broke into a laugh. "I say, Vivien, the first time I saw you I was following the hounds on foot! That's all I can do. The hunt gets out of sight, but sometimes you can tell where it's going. That's about my form. Now if I was a clever chap like Harry!"