“I didn’t think you were this evening.”

“And why not?”

“Well,” she answered, “you have many liabilities—of different sorts.” With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham. “And then you’re so deep.”

It produced in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race. “It’s you, cara, who are deep.”

Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at last that it was true. “Then I shall have need of it all.”

“But what would you have done,” he was by this time asking, “if I HADN’T come in?”

“I don’t know.” She had hesitated. “What would you?”

“Oh; I oh—that isn’t the question. I depend upon you. I go on. You would have spoken to-morrow?”

“I think I would have waited.”

“And for what?” he asked.