Chapter XXIII - Page 2

it," he continued to blurt out, "that may be all right. That is, if it's wrong, don't you know? It's all right if it's wrong," he remarkably explained.

What was he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the counter- clerk were already interested; no one would have the decency to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him and her general curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her real. "I quite understand," she said with benevolent, with almost patronising quickness. "The lady has forgotten what she did put."

"Forgotten most wretchedly, and it's an immense inconvenience. It has only just been found that it didn't get there; so that if we could immediately have it--"

"Immediately?"

"Every minute counts. You have," he pleaded, "surely got them on file?"

"So that you can see it on the spot?"

"Yes, please--this very minute." The counter rang with his knuckles, with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. "Do, do hunt it up!" he repeated.

"I dare say we could get it for you," the girl weetly returned.

"Get it?"--he looked aghast. "When?"

"Probably by to-morrow."

"Then it isn't here?"--his face was pitiful.

She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness, and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she couldn't guess. She was more and more glad she didn't want to. "It has been sent on."

"But how do you know if you don't look?"

She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, quite divine. "It was August 23rd, and we've nothing later here than August 27th."

Something leaped into his face. "27th--23rd? Then you're sure? You know?"

She felt she scarce knew what--as if she might soon be pounced upon for some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker's might be supposed to have schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced. Scandal?--it had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard's wonderful face. Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene--a great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd,