"You saw she had no idea of the name. It was Palliser, wasn't it?"
"Unless it was Verschoyle." Major Roper only says this to convince himself that he might have forgotten the name—a sort of washy palliation of his Harrisson invention. It brings him within a measurable distance of a clear conscience.
"No, it wasn't Verschoyle. I remember the Verschoyle case." By this time Old Jack is feeling quite truthful. "It was Palliser, and it's not for me to blame him. He only did what you or
I might have done—any man. A bit hot-headed, perhaps. But look here, Roper...."
The General dropped his voice, and went on speaking almost in a whisper, but earnestly, for more than a minute. Then he raised it again.
"It was that point. If you say a word to the girl, or begin giving her any information, and she gets the idea you can tell her more, she'll just go straight for you and say she must be told the whole. I can see it in her eyes. And you can't tell her the whole. You know you can't!"
The Major fidgeted visibly. He knew he should go round to learn about his old friend (it was barely a quarter of a mile) as soon as the least diminution of the fog gave him an excuse. And he was sure to see Sally. He exaggerated her age. "The gyairl's twenty-two," said he weakly. The General continued:
"I'm only speaking, mind you, on the hypothesis.... I'm supposing the case to have been what I told you just now. Otherwise, you could work the telling of it on the usual lines—unfaithfulness, estranged affections, desertion—all the respectable produceable phrases. But as for making that little Miss Nightingale understand—that is, without making her life unbearable to her—it can't be done, Major. It can't be done, old chap!"
"I see your game. I'll tell her to ask her mother."
"It can't be done that way. I hope the child's safe in the fog." The General embarked on a long pause. There was plenty of time—more time than he had (so his thought ran) when his rear-guard was cut off by the Afridis in the Khyber Pass. But then the problem was not so difficult as telling this live girl how she came to be one—telling her, that is, without poisoning her life and shrouding her heart in a fog as dense as the one that was going to make the street-lamps outside futile when night should come to help it—telling her without dashing the irresistible glee of those eyebrows and quenching the smile that opened the casket of pearls that all who knew her thought of her by.