but that’s what Sir Magnus says.  He has done something awfully disreputable.  I don’t quite understand what it is, but it’s something which ought to make him unfit to be her husband.  Nobody knows the world better than Sir Magnus, and he says that it is so.”  “Nobody does know the world better than Sir Magnus,” said Arbuthnot.  And so that conversation was brought to an end.

One day soon after this he caught her walking in the garden.  Her mother and Miss Abbot were still out with Lady Mountjoy in the carriage, and Sir Magnus had retired after the fatigue of his ride to sleep for half an hour before dinner.  “All alone, Miss Mountjoy?” he said.

“Yes, alone, Mr. Anderson.  I’m never in better company.”

“So I think; but then if I were here you wouldn’t be all alone, would you?”

“Not if you were with me.”

“That’s what I mean.  But yet two people may be alone, as regards the world at large.  Mayn’t they?”

“I don’t understand the nicety of language well enough to say.  We used to have a question among us when we were children whether a wild beast could howl in an empty cavern.  It’s the same sort of thing.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“Because the cavern would not be empty if the wild beast were in it.  Did you ever see a girl bang an egg against a wall in a stocking, and then look awfully surprised because she had smashed it?”

“I don’t understand the joke.”

“She had been told she couldn’t break an egg in an empty stocking.  Then she was made to look in, and there was the broken egg for her pains.  I don’t know what made me tell you that story.”

“It’s a very good story.  I’ll get Miss Abbott to do it to-night.  She believes everything.”

“And everybody?  Then she’s a happy woman.”

“I wish you’d believe everybody.”

“So I do;—­nearly everybody.  There are some inveterate liars whom nobody can believe.”

“I hope I am not regarded as one.”

“You? certainly not.  If anybody were to speak of you as such behind your back no one would take your part more loyally than I. But nobody would.”

“That’s something, at any rate.  Then you do believe that I love you?”

“I believe that you think so.”

“And that I don’t know my own heart?”

“That’s very common, Mr. Anderson.  I wasn’t quite sure of my own heart twelve months ago, but I know it now.”  He felt that his hopes ran very low when this was said.  She had never before spoken to him of his rival, nor had he to her.  He knew, or fancied that he knew, that “her heart had been touched,” as he had said to Arbuthnot.  But the “touch” must have been very deep if she felt herself constrained to speak to him on the subject.  It had been his desire to pass over Mr. Annesley, and never to hear the name mentioned between them.  “You were speaking of your own heart.”

“Well I was, no doubt.  It is a silly thing to talk of, I dare say.”