“That’s a good deal for a soul, Henry.  It’s a large amount of the sure and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and problematical.”

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor warranted.  He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in the last half-hour he had been only afraid of.  It was not the commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man’s inner secret self.  He had been in this position more than once before—­when men wanted to tell him things he didn’t want to know—­when, whipped by conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the desperate suffer to be torn.  He had noted before that it was generally men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve—­his rather cowardly reserve, he called it—­he was always impelled to run away from them.  As there was no possibility of running away now, he could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion was trying to say.

“So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?” his host questioned, abruptly.

“Not everything; some things.  I lost money—­often; but on the whole I made it.”

“Good!  With me it was always the other way.”

The pause that followed was an uneasy one, otherwise Temple would not have seized on the first topic that came to hand to fill it up.

“You’ll miss Olivia when she’s gone, Henry.”

“Y-yes; if she goes.”

The implied doubt startled Davenant, but Temple continued to smoke pensively.  “I’ve thought,” he said, after a puff or two at his cigar, “I’ve thought you seemed to be anticipating something in the way of a—­hitch.”

Guion held his cigar with some deliberation over an ash-tray, knocking off the ash with his little finger as though it were a task demanding precision.

“You’ll know all about it to-morrow, perhaps—­or in a few days at latest.  It can’t be kept quiet much longer.  I got the impression at dinner that you’d heard something already.”

“Nothing but gossip, Henry.”

Guion smiled, but with a wince.  “I’ve noticed,” he said, “that there’s a certain kind of gossip that rarely gets about unless there’s some cause for it—­on the principle of no smoke without fire.  If you’ve heard anything, it’s probably true.”

“I was afraid it might be.  But in that case I wonder you allowed Olivia to go ahead.”