"But that's just what I can't understand!"
"Yet the fact remains, Miss Brabazon, and I think it ought to count."
"My dear young man, that's my only excuse for this very infliction!" cried Miss Julia, with invincible jocosity. "If you'd rather it were destroyed, I shall be quite ready to destroy it, as Mr. Gillon knows. But I should like you to hear the whole of it first."
"And I could judge so much better if I read the rest to myself!"
And still he held his corner of the MS., and she hers with an equal tenacity, which I believe to have been partly reflex and instinctive, but otherwise due to the discovery that she had written quite serenely about a blasphemer and an atheist, and not for a moment to any other qualm or apprehension whatsoever. And then as I watched them their eyes looked past me with one accord; the sheaf of fastened sheets fluttered to the ground between them; and I turned to behold the Vicar standing grim and gaunt upon the threshold, with a much younger and still more scandalised face peeping over his shoulder.
"I didn't know that you were entertaining company," observed the Vicar, bowing coldly to us youths. "Are you aware that it's nearly midnight?"
Miss Julia said she never could have believed it, but that she must have lost all sense of time, as she had been reading something to us.
"I'm sure that was very kind, and has been much appreciated," said the Vicar, with his polar smile. "I suppose this was what you were reading?"
And he was swooping down on the MS., but Delavoye was quicker; and quicker yet than either hand was the foot interposed like lightning by the Vicar.
"You'll allow me?" he said, and so picked the crumpled sheets from under it. Uvo bowed, and the other returned the courtesy with ironic interest.