staring eyes moved for a glance towards Blunt, I, who was occupying
the divan, raised myself on the cushions a little and Mr. Blunt,
with half a turn, put his elbow on the table.

"I asked her what it was. I don't see," went on Mr. Blunt, with a
perfectly horrible gentleness, "why I should have shown particular
consideration to the heiress of Mr. Allegre. I don't mean to that
particular mood of hers. It was the mood of weariness. And so she
told me. It's fear. I will say it once again: Fear. . . ."

He added after a pause, "There can be not the slightest doubt of
her courage. But she distinctly uttered the word fear."

There was under the table the noise of Mills stretching his legs.

"A person of imagination," he began, "a young, virgin intelligence,
steeped for nearly five years in the talk of Allegre's studio,
where every hard truth had been cracked and every belief had been
worried into shreds. They were like a lot of intellectual dogs,
you know . . ."

"Yes, yes, of course," Blunt interrupted hastily, "the intellectual
personality altogether adrift, a soul without a home . . . but I,
who am neither very fine nor very deep, I am convinced that the
fear is material."

"Because she confessed to it being that?" insinuated Mills.

"No, because she didn't," contradicted Blunt, with an angry frown
and in an extremely suave voice. "In fact, she bit her tongue.