“Mr. Upton would feel bound to tell.”
“I don’t see that. Didn’t you hear what he said about a man’s secrets dying with him?”
“He’s so kind! He says that; he said it again to me; but this is the mystery of the day. It’ll be the talk for months, if not years. And as yet only you and I, in all the world, have found it out!”
She looked at him so wistfully, so sweetly and sadly and confidentially, that he would have been either more or less than human boy if he had failed to see her heart’s desire, and how it was still in his power to save her the supreme humiliation and distress of sharing their secret with the world. He made up his mind on the spot; and yet it was a mind that looked both ways at every turn of affairs, and even then he saw what he was going to lose. Fred and Horace would not sit nearly so spellbound as they might have done, would probably back their penetration of the mystery against his! There would be no boasting about it in front of the hall fire at school, no breathing it even to Smith minor out for a walk; no adventure to recount all his days; and Pocket was one to whom the salt of an adventure would always be its subsequent recital. But he could “play the game” as well as Horace himself, when he happened to have no doubt as to the game to play. And now he had none whatever.
“Phillida, if you wish it, I’ll never breathe a syllable of all this to a single soul on earth, I don’t care who they are, or what they do to me!”
He wanted them to put him on the rack that moment.
“Oh, Tony, do you mean it?”
Her eyes had filled.
“Of course I mean it! I’ll swear it more solemnly than I’ve ever sworn anything in my life so far.”
“No, no! Your word’s enough. Don’t I know what that’s worth, after this terrible week?”