"Portia," he demanded, "is she ill? You'll have to tell me that."
Even this question she didn't answer immediately. "No," she said at last. "She's not ill. I'll take the responsibility of telling you that."
"You mean that's all you will tell me?" he persisted. "Why? On her instructions?"
"I think we'll have to sit down somewhere," said Portia. "Beside the road over there where it's shady."
"I got a letter from Rose yesterday," she said, after they'd been seated for a while. "She asked me in it not to go on writing you the little—bulletins that I'd been sending every week; not to tell you anything at all. So you see I've gone rather beyond her instructions in saying even as much as I have."
"And you," he asked quickly; "you mean to comply with a request like that?"
"I must," said Portia. "I can't do anything else."
He made no comment in words, but she interpreted his uncontrollable gesture of angry protest, and answered it.
"It's not a question of conscientious scruples; keeping my word, not betraying a confidence; anything like that. A year ago if she'd made such a request I'd have paid no attention to it. I'd have taken the responsibility of acting against her wishes, for her own good, if I happened to see it that way, without any hesitation at all. But Rose has shown herself so much bigger and stronger a person than I, and she's done a thing that would have been so splendidly beyond my courage to do that there's no question of my interfering. She's entitled to make her own decisions. So," she went on with a little difficulty, "I shan't betray her confidence nor disregard her instructions. But there's one thing I can do, one thing I can tell you, because it's my confidence, not hers."
The very obvious fact that her confidences were not of great moment to him, the way he sat there beside her in a glum abstraction through the rather long silence that followed her preface, made it easier for her to go on.