“Well, old boy, I’ll be off to-night.  The lawyer is done with me here and now I’ll go to Edom and finish what’s to be done there.  Then in a few days I’ll be out of this machine and back to the ranche.  You know I’ve decided that my message to the world would best take the substantial form of beef—­a message which no one will esteem unpractical.”

He paused, noting the other’s general droop of gloom.

“But what’s the trouble, old chap?  You look done up!”

“Bernal—­it’s all because I am too good-hearted, too unsuspecting.  Being slow to think evil of others, I foolishly assume that others will be equally charitable.  And you don’t know what women are—­you don’t know how the sentimental ones impose upon a man in my office.  I give you my word of honour as a man—­my word of honour, mind you!—­there never has been a thing between us but the purest, the most elevated—­the loftiest, most ideal—­”

“Hold on, old chap—­I shall have to take the car ahead, you know, if you won’t let me on this one....”

“—­as pure a woman as God ever made, while as for myself, I think my integrity of purpose and honesty of character, my sense of loyalty should be sufficiently known—­”

“Say, old boy—­” Bernal’s face had lighted with a sudden flash of insight—­“is it—­I don’t wish to be indiscreet—­but is it anything about Mrs. Wyeth?”

“Then you do know?”

“Nothing, except that Nance met me at the door just now and puzzled me a bit by her very curious manner of asking if I had been at the Wyeth’s this afternoon.”

“What?” The other turned upon him, his eyes again blazing with the yellow points, his whole figure alert.  “She asked you that—­Really?”

“To be sure!”

“And you said—­”

“’No’—­of course—­and she mumbled something about having been foolish to think I could have been.  You know, old man, Nance was troubled.  I could see that.”

His brother was now pacing the floor, his head bent from the beautifully squared shoulders, his face the face of a mind working busily.

“An idiot I was—­she didn’t know me—­I had only to—­”

Bernal interrupted.

“Are you talking to yourself, or to me?”

The rector of St. Antipas turned at one end of his walk.

“To both of us, brother.  I tell you there has been nothing between us—­never anything except the most flawless idealism.  I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circumstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them.  I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute—­’Oh, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!’”

“If I follow you, old chap, Nancy observed some scene this afternoon in which it occurred to her that I might have been an actor.”  There was quick pain, a sinking in his heart.