And Mary shivered as she spoke.
"He must be a beast," she added.
They were walking their horses along the turf at the side of the road skirting the woods. Reggie pulled up and Mary stopped also a little in front.
"Got a stone?" she asked carelessly.
Reggie did not answer or dismount, and she turned in her saddle to look at him, to meet his crooked, whimsical smile. Suddenly he dropped his reins and beat his breast, exclaiming melodramatically: "And Nathan said unto David, 'Thou art the man.'"
"What on earth do you mean?" Mary asked, bewildered. "What man? do you mean you'd behave like the man in the story, or you wouldn't, or . . . Oh, Reggie, you don't mean to say you wrote it yourself?"
"You have spoken."
"You must be awfully clever!" Mary ejaculated with awe-struck admiration.
"My cleverness will not be of much comfort to me if you persist in your wrong-headed opinion that the man who wrote that story is a beast."
"Oh, that's different. I know you, you see, and you're not a beast.
You aren't really like that."