"I'll tell you everything,"
Miles said--"I mean I'll tell you anything you like.
You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right,
and I WILL tell you--I WILL. But not now."
"Why not now?"
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom,
outside, someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting.
"I have to see Luke."
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made
up my truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting.
"Well, then, go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise.
Only, in return for that, satisfy, before you leave me,
one very much smaller request."
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still
a little to bargain. "Very much smaller--?"
"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"--oh, my work preoccupied me,
and I was offhand!--"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall,
you took, you know, my letter."
XXIV
My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--
a stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to
the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close,
and, while I just fell for support against the nearest piece
of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back to the window.
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