"Not knowing?"
"Not knowing."
"But being intimate with her, you could scarcely avoid asking her the question."
"I did ask her, and I was curious to find out. She would not satisfy me; and when I pressed her, she said the other one--Pauline--had made her promise not to tell."
"You don't know, then, where she was born?"
"No."
"Her refusal to tell you--was it lightly or seriously uttered?"
"Seriously."
"As though there was a secret in her life she wished to conceal?"
"I never thought of it in that way, but I can see now it must have been so."