“It’s very good of you, damn you!” my visitor laughed, red and really grave. Then he said: “You’d like to see that scoundrel publicly glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pension?”
I braced myself. “Taking one form of public recognition with another it seems to me on the whole I should be able to bear it. When I see the compliments that are paid right and left I ask myself why this one shouldn’t take its course. This therefore is what you’re entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I’ve some evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Mss Anvoy to remain in ignorance of it.”
“And to invite me to do the same?”
“Oh you don’t require it—you’ve evidence enough. I speak of a sealed letter that I’ve been requested to deliver to her.”
“And you don’t mean to?”
“There’s only one consideration that would make me,” I said.
Gravener’s clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but evidently without fishing up a clue to this motive—a failure by which I was almost wounded. “What does the letter contain?”
“It’s sealed, as I tell you, and I don’t know what it contains.”
“Why is it sent through you?”
“Rather than you?” I wondered how to put the thing. “The only explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may have been told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram.”