"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
"The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
"Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. "Yes--tomorrow. Now I must go to bed.
Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left
us slightly bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall
we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke.
"Well, if I don't know who she was in love with, I know
who HE was."
"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus--at that age! But it's rather nice,
his long reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
"With this outbreak at last."
"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion
of Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that,
in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else.
The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening
of a serial, had been told; we handshook and "candlestuck,"
as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had,
by the first post, gone off to his London apartments;
but in spite of--or perhaps just on account of--the eventual
diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till
after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact,
as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our
hopes were fixed.
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