“Father, what do you suppose that message meant?”

“Is it obliged to mean anything?”

“Things generally do, don’t they?”

Vetch smiled as he looked down at her; but his smile conveyed anxiety rather than amusement to her observant eyes.  “Oh, if things are said by Gershom, they generally mean hell,” he responded.  “Perhaps I’ll find out Thursday night; there’s to be a meeting then, and it looks as if somebody might make trouble.”  Then he patted her shoulder.  “Don’t worry about Gershom, honey,” he added in the way he used to speak when she fell and hurt herself as a child.  “Don’t worry your mind about Gershom.  I’ll take care of him.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was not worrying about Gershom, but about the woman dying all alone in that dark room in Leigh Street.  If he had only looked less disturbed she might have done so; and when she thought of it afterward, she understood that frankness would have been by far the wiser course.  However, while she wondered what she ought to say, the opportunity slipped by, and the ringing of the telephone on his desk called him away from her.

Corinna, meanwhile, was rolling down the drive over the slanting shadows of the linden trees.  She looked thoughtful, for she was trying to decide what it was about Vetch that made her believe in him so profoundly when she was with him and yet begin to distrust him as soon as she got far enough away to gain a perspective?  Gossip probably, she reflected.  When she was with him her confidence was the natural response of her own unbiassed perceptions; when she left him she passed immediately into an atmosphere that was charged with the suspicions of other people.  She remembered the stories, true or false, which had been hinted and whispered before the last election.  Malicious gossip that, and as unfounded no doubt as the rest.  She recalled the muttered insinuations of fraudulent political stratagems, of what Benham had called the Governor’s weathercock principles.  In Vetch’s presence, she realized that she invariably lost sight of these structural or surface blemishes, and judged him by some standard which was different from the one she had inherited with the shape of her nose and the colour of her eyes.  What troubled her was not so much the riddle of Vetch’s personality as the fact that there was another mental world beyond the one she had always inhabited, and that this other world was filled, like her own, with obscure moral and spiritual images.

As she approached the club at the corner she saw Benham come out of the door; and stopping the car she waited, smiling, until he joined her.  While she watched him cross the pavement, she rejoiced in the thoroughbred fineness and thinness of his appearance—­in his clear-cut Roman features and in the impenetrable reticence of his expression.  Yes, she loved him as well as she could love any man; and that, she told herself, with a touch of cynical amusement, was just so much and no more, just enough to bring happiness, but not enough to bring pain.