"He said he told that lie because Madam made a face at him. He confesses to that."
Freddy thought for a moment while he smoked, then he said slowly and deliberately: "If she got that information from your diary, she could easily get more. Baksheesh will make the dead give up their secrets. That is why Bismarck said to his generals, never tell your own shirt what you want kept a secret. Diaries are dangerous things, Meg."
"I wrote it in French," Meg said. "I thought only the servants would stoop to reading it and they can't read French."
"Next time, try invisible ink. In Egypt, once a thing is written or told, it is public property."
"I scarcely write anything now," she said. "I feel as if some spy will see it, and the dry bones of a diary never interest me."
As Freddy was leaving the sitting-room—he was going to bed for a couple of hours before he began work again—Margaret said to him:
"Just tell me before you go, where you first heard the report about
Michael, and from whom you heard it."
"One or two days ago," he said. "I heard a smouldering gossip about it going on amongst the workmen. They'd got wind of it somehow. No one ever knows how these things begin. Then I met young King from Professor L——'s camp, and he told me the whole story. He knew Millicent very well. He said she's not what you could call an immoral woman so much as a woman without morals. He confesses he never met anyone in the least like her before, and he rather prides himself on his knowledge of the world—he would have us believe that he has seen a devil of a lot. He wondered at a man of Michael's refined temperament taking her into the desert in the way he has done."
"He never took her," Meg said. "Isn't it hateful, Freddy, hearing people make these assertions about our Mike?"
"That's what I meant," Freddy said, "when I told you that I hated your name being mixed up with his."