“I won’t,” he said.  But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

“You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.”

“Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered.  But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent.  I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel—­”

“Yes, yes!”

“And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly—­that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”

“I was sometimes afraid so, Philip.  But—­”

“And I don’t believe now that the hypothetical case brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal.  She was still weak from the sickness she had been through—­too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up.  Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it.  There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements after this.”

“Why shouldn’t she go on?” his mother asked, with a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.

“Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took her work out of the category of business and made her acceptance in it a matter of sentiment.”

“She explained it to you herself?”

“Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I don’t say that she had been more than negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley’s claim on her before.  As it was, she sent for me to her room the next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there.  She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a moment.”

Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, “I don’t like it, Philip.”

“I knew you wouldn’t.  It was what I said to myself at the time.  You were so present with me that I seemed to have you there chaperoning the interview.”  His mother shrugged, and he went on:  “She said she wished to tell me something first, and then she said, ’I want to do it while I have the courage, if it’s courage; perhaps it’s just desperation.  I am Jerusha Brown.’”

His mother began, “But you said—­” and then stopped herself.