She bent her head. Every one is good at keeping secrets, but you must ask them first. They never know how good they are until they are waiting for a secret to be told.

"Well, I want you to read this letter," I went on. "Don't let the Miss Fennells see it. Tuck it away into your dress. Read it to-night, and when you can, let me have an answer. I don't know how you can manage it; you must find that out for yourself; but let me have an answer. I shall stay here in Ballysheen till I get it. You heard my name, didn't you? Bellairs—I'm staying with the Townshends. Send the answer there—to their house—if you can."

So I gave Clarissa the letter. I saw her bury it in the stiff bodice of that black prison dress where her heart beat warm against it.

I had given it only just in time. A few more paces and we had come to the end of the cliff path. Here, as you know, it broadens to a wide road and the wall begins, protecting the field where stands the Miss Fennells' house.

By clever manœuvring they made us all come into line, and we walked the remainder of the distance, talking of such ordinary things as the Miss Fennells are conversant with. Their range of topics, I must admit, is most limited even then. When we had said good-night and I had felt the first touch of Clarissa's hand—a slight hesitating little hand it is—Bellwattle and I walked home.

She said not a word to me. That is so wise in women. However wrong in fact their guessing may be, there is a fundamental instinct of right about it which tells them what the circumstances demand. A man, guessing as she had been, would have poured questions upon me, asking me what I thought of Clarissa, and not because he was curious, but only to find out if he were right. Now, a woman never does that. To begin with, she knows she is right, and, filled as she is with curiosity, she asks no questions. She just finds out.

So Bellwattle said nothing. She just let me think. And over and over again I thought: "Will she go home if I tell her to? Will she go home if I tell her to?"

But there was a little thought that kept creeping in between each one of those questions. "Will she ever go home if I tell her to?" I said to myself, and then I thought how warm that letter would be when, in the secrecy of her bedroom, Clarissa should take it from her dress to read. And the more I asked myself the one, the more I pictured to myself the other.

"It's the very devil," 

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