A
voice telling an old story, which had never been forgotten, but merely
laid aside in the memory among those things that never are forgotten.
Finding Arthur's troubled gaze upon her, she seemed to recollect herself
with a little gesture of her hand to her breast as if breathing were
difficult.
"That does not sound like a thing Jem would do," she said, with one of
those flashes of shrewd observation which sometimes come to inconsequent
people, and make it difficult for those around them to be sure how much
they see and how much passes unobserved.
"It was not Jem, it was this other man."
"Which other man?" Mrs. Agar gave a little gasp, as if she had found
something she feared to find.
"The man who told me--he was Jem's superior officer."
"When did he tell you--where?"
"He came to see me at Cambridge, and brought those things of Jem's,"
replied Arthur. So far from feeling guilty at thus revealing all that he
had promised to keep secret, he was now beginning to experience some
pangs of conscience at the recollection of a concealment which, by a
supreme effort, had been made to extend to four months.
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