"Ah, my dear, I've kept you secret. She doesn't know we know each other. And if she did——"
She finished it with a wonderful look, a look of unblinking yet vaguely, pitifully uncandid candour.
She had always met him, and would always have to meet him, with the idea that there was nothing in it; for, if she once admitted that there was anything, then they were done for. She couldn't (how could she?) let him keep on coming with that thought in him, acknowledged by them both.
That was where she came in and where her secret, her gift, would work now more beneficently than ever. The beauty of it was that it would make them safe, absolutely safe. She had only got to apply it to that thought of his and the thought would not exist. Since she could get at him, she could do for him what he, poor dear, could not perhaps always do for himself; she could keep that dreadful possibility in him under; she could in fact, make their communion all that she most wanted it to be.
"I don't like it," he said, miserably. "I don't like it."
A little line of worry was coming in his face again.
The door opened and a maid began to go in and out, laying the table for their meal. He watched the door close on her and said, "Won't that woman wonder what I come for?"
"She can see what you come for." She smiled. "Why are you spoiling it with thinking things?"
"It's for you I think them. I don't mind. It doesn't matter so much for me. But I want you to be safe."
"Oh, I'm safe, my dear," she answered.