rumour?'

'How can I tell you?' said she.

'Well, it is true!' he cried. 'It's doubly and trebly true! It's the
greatest truth in the world at the present moment. It is one of those
truths that a believer can't keep to himself.' He paused, expectant. 'A
woman less fine than you would have protested against this sudden
avowal, which is only too like me--too like Hugo. You don't protest. I
knew you wouldn't. I knew you knew. You asked for candour. You have it.
I love you.'

'Then, why,' she demanded firmly, with a desolating smile--'why do you
have me followed by your private detective?'

Hugo was caught in a trap. He had hesitated long before instructing
Albert Shawn to shadow Camilla, but in the end his desire for exact
knowledge concerning her, and his possession of a corps of detectives
ready to hand, had proved too much for his scruples. He had, however,
till that day discovered little of importance for his pains--merely that
her parents, who were dead, had kept a small milliner's shop in Edgware
Road, that her age was twenty-five, that she had come to his millinery
department with a good testimonial from an establishment in Walham
Green, that she lived in lodgings at Fulham and saw scarcely anyone, and
that she had once been a typewriter.

'The fact is--'

He stopped, perceiving that the 'fact' would not do at all, and that to
explain to the woman you love why you have spied on her is a somewhat