of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to
the "Letters." Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland
inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else's
suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table without
a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.

The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in
Alexa's presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a
beaconing light thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed
to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor
draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife's
composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the
discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal
landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only
to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance.
Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex
surface. One may conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth;
but Alexa's candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road
once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.

Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising
behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a
romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the
cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing
through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the "Letters"
lying open on his wife's table. He picked up the book and looked
at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the
last . . . he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book
and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among