went for a cup of coffee at the inn?" He had confided so absolutely in
her that his admission had not troubled him at the time, and it had not
troubled him since, till now when he found the fact given this hideous
publicity, and knew that it could have become known only through her:
through her who had seemed to make herself the protectress of his
apparition and to guard it with indignation even against his own slight!

He could not tell himself what to think of her, and in this disability he
had at least the sad comfort of literally thinking nothing of her; but he
could not keep his thoughts away from St. John. It appeared to him that
he thought and lived nothing else till his dread concreted itself in the
letter which came from St. John as soon as that fatal newspaper could
reach him, and his demand for an explanation could come back to Hewson.
He wrote from St. Johnswort, where he had already gone for the season,
and he assumed, as no doubt he had a right to do, that the whole thing
was a fake, and that if Hewson was hesitating about denying it for fear
of giving it further prominence, or out of contempt for it, he wished
that he would not hesitate. There were reasons, which would suggest
themselves to Hewson, why the thing, if merely and entirely a fake,
should be very annoying, and he thought that it would be best to make the
denial immediate and imperative. To this end he advised Hewson's sending
the newspaper people a lawyer's letter; with the ulterior trouble which
this would intimate they would move in the matter with a quickened
conscience.

Apparently St. John was very much in earnest, and Hewson would eagerly
have lied out of it, he felt in sudden depravity, from a just regard for
St. John's right to privacy in his own premises, but no lying, not the
boldest, not the most ingenious, could now avail. Scores of people could
witness that they had heard Hewson tell the story at first hand; at