“Why, I always believed what you said, Mr. Gregory.”
“Well?”
Clementina paused, with her head seriously on one side. “I should want to think about it before I said anything.”
“You are right,” he submitted, dropping his outstretched arms to his side. “I have been thinking only of myself, as usual.”
“No,” she protested, compassionately. “But doesn't it seem as if we ought to be su'a, this time? I did ca'e for you then, but I was very young, and I don't know yet—I thought I had always felt just as you did, but now—Don't you think we had both betta wait a little while till we ah' moa suttain?”
They stood looking at each other, and he said, with a kind of passionate self-denial, “Yes, think it over for me, too. I will come back, if you will let me.”
“Oh, thank you!” she cried after him, gratefully, as if his forbearance were the greatest favor.
When he was gone she tried to release herself from the kind of abeyance in which she seemed to have gone back and been as subject to him as in the first days when he had awed her and charmed her with his superiority at Middlemount, and he again older and freer as she had grown since.
He came back late in the afternoon, looking jaded and distraught. Hinkle, who looked neither, was with him. “Well,” he began, “this is the greatest thing in my experience. Belsky's not only alive and well, but Mr. Gregory and I are both at large. I did think, one time, that the police would take us into custody on account of our morbid interest in the thing, and I don't believe we should have got off, if the Consul hadn't gone bail for us, so to speak. I thought we had better take the Consul in, on our way, and it was lucky we did.”
Clementina did not understand all the implications, but she was willing to take Mr. Hinkle's fun on trust. “I don't believe you'll convince Mrs. Landa that Mr. Belsky's alive and well, till you bring him back to say so.”