“And you said it?” Her face expressed both admiration and a certain horror.

“Yes.  I told him he must choose between me and his bargain.”

“That must have been hard.”

“He didn’t seem to find it so.  Anyhow, he hasn’t chosen me.”

“I meant hard for you to have to say it.”

“I assure you it came uncommonly easy at the moment.”

“Don’t—­don’t.”

“I’m not going to defend him simply because he happens to be my father.  I don’t even defend myself.”

“You?  You didn’t know.”

“I knew quite enough.  I knew he might cheat you without meaning to.  I didn’t think he’d do it so soon or so infamously, but, to tell the truth, I went up to town on purpose to prevent it.”

“I know—­I know that was what you went for.”  She seemed to be answering some incessant voice that accused him, and he perceived that the precipitancy of his action suggested a very different interpretation.  His position was odious enough in all conscience, but as yet it had not occurred to him that he could be suspected of complicity in the actual fraud.

“Why didn’t I do something to prevent it before?”

“But—­didn’t you?”

“I did everything I could.  I wrote to my father—­if that’s anything; the result, as you see, was a cheque for the two hundred that should have been three thousand.”

“Did it never occur to you to write to anybody else, to Mr. Jewdwine, for instance?”

She brought out the question shrinkingly, as if urged against her will by some intolerable compulsion, and he judged that this time they had touched what was, for her, a vital point.

“Of course it occurred to me.  Haven’t you heard from him?”

“I have.  But hardly in time for him to do anything.”

He reflected.  Jewdwine had written; therefore his intentions had been good.  But he had delayed considerably in writing; evidently, then, he had been embarrassed.  He had not mentioned that he had heard from him; and why shouldn’t he have mentioned it?  Oh, well—­after all, why should he?  At the back of his mind there had crawled a wriggling, worm-like suspicion of Jewdwine.  He saw it wriggling and stamped on it instantly.

There were signs of acute anxiety on Miss Harden’s face.  It was as if she implored him to say something consoling about Jewdwine, something that would make him pure in her troubled sight.  A light dawned on him.

“Did you write to him?” she asked.

He saw what she wanted him to say, and he said it.  “Yes, I wrote.  But I suppose I did it too late, like everything else I’ve done.”

He had told the truth, but not the whole truth, which would have been damaging to Jewdwine.  To deny altogether that he had written would have been a clumsy and unnecessary falsehood, easily detected.  Something more masterly was required of him, and he achieved it without an instant’s hesitation, and with his eyes open to the consequences.  He knew that he was deliberately suppressing the one detail that proved his own innocence.  But as their eyes met he saw that she knew it, too; that she divined him through the web that wrapped him round.