"I never knew it."
"You're not supposed to know. And you wouldn't, unless you did know. And please—you don't; you don't know anything."
He smiled. "No. You haven't told me, have you?"
"I only told you because you never tell things, and because——"
"Because?" He waited, smiling.
"Because I wanted you to see he doesn't count."
"Well—but she's all right, I take it?"
At first she failed to grasp his implication that if, owing to his affliction, Harding Powell didn't count, Milly, his young wife did. Her faculties of observation and of inference would, he took it, be unimpaired.
"She'll wonder, won't she?" he expounded.
"About us? Not she. She's too much wrapped up in him to notice anyone."