He wonderfully glared. “Am I then already frightening you?” He shook his head rather sadly. “I’m not in the least trying yet. There’s something,” he added after an instant, “that I do want too awfully to ask you.”
“Well then—!” If she had not eagerness she had at least charity.
“Oh but you see I reflect that though you show all the courage to go to the roots and depths with ME, I’m not—I never have been—fully conscious of the nerve for doing as much with you. It’s a question,” Mitchy explained, “of how much—of a particular matter—you know.”
She continued ever so kindly to face him. “Hasn’t it come out all round now that I know everything?”
Her reply, in this form, took a minute or two to operate, but when it began to do so it fairly diffused a light. Mitchy’s face turned of a colour that might have been produced by her holding close to it some lantern wonderfully glazed. “You know, you know!” he then rang out.
“Of course I know.”
“You know, you know!” Mitchy repeated.
“Everything,” she imperturbably went on, “but what you’re talking about.”
He was silent a little, his eyes on her. “May I kiss your hand?”
“No,” she answered: “that’s what I call wild.”