"Yes, just that!" he said softly, raising his eyes to her in gratitude. "Thank you, Miss Galland!"
He was going after another "Thank you!" and a bow; going with the slow step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized his hands in a firm caress.
"Forgive me, Gustave!" he begged. "Forgive the most brutal of all injuries—that which wounds a friend's sensibilities."
"Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his attitude changed to one of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"
"Yes"
"Had you suspected me before that?"
"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him. There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he smiled as he had at the bumblebee.
"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.
"No, I don't think so."
He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.