And now, on her knees at my knee by our dying dining-room fire, she asked me if I remembered that evening in Kensington Gardens.
All at once I vowed that I wouldn't stand it—wouldn't stand the intervention of anything on earth, whether of my own making or another's, between us and that first joy. And again, as I held her, I thought of Louie's words. Louie was right—or at least half right. For the present the shadow had passed, but unless I did something now, it would return. Again we should drift apart, and Miss Levey would keep us so. If I did not partly explain, circumstances might do so entirely. Yes, Louie was so far right. If I was to keep the dearest thing on earth to me, I must make a half-truth seem to guarantee the false remainder, and tell Evie of that cruel Kitty Windus episode.
And so I come to my first, though not to my last, attempt to tell without telling, and, as they say, to make my omelette without breaking my eggs.
Her cheek was still against my hand; I looked mournfully down on her. With such a goal it didn't much matter where I began.
"What do you suppose, darling," I began, "Miss Levey's object is in all this?"
Evie's eyes moved to the mantelpiece. It was a bare entablature of black marble, with nothing on it but a small Swiss clock and one or two cabinet photographs—no Arab horsemen. Shyly she glanced from the mantelpiece corner, where the horsemen should have been, to me.
"Yes, she asked to-day whether you'd got it mended," she murmured.
"Do you really like her?"
"I was so lonely, Jeff," she pleaded.