found her, with the sense of danger, the confused horror of having
dealt a blow. But the blood rushed back to its courses with his
still quicker consciousness of safety, and he could make out, as he
recovered his balance, that his emotion struck her simply as a
violent surprise. He gave a muffled murmur: "Ah, it's you, my
beloved!" which lost itself as he drew her close and held her long,
in the intensity of his embrace and the wonder of his escape. It
took more than a minute for him to say over to himself often enough,
with his hidden face: "Ah, she must never, never know!"

She never knew; she only learned, when she asked him casually, that
he had in fact destroyed the old documents she had had such a comic
caprice about. The sensibility, the curiosity they had had the queer
privilege of exciting in her had lapsed with the event as
irresponsibly as they had arisen, and she appeared to have forgotten,
or rather to attribute now to other causes, the agitation and several
of the odd incidents that accompanied them. They naturally gave
Peter Baron rather more to think about, much food, indeed, for
clandestine meditation, some of which, in spite of the pains he took
not to be caught, was noted by his friend and interpreted, to his
knowledge, as depression produced by the long probation she succeeded
in imposing on him. He was more patient than she could guess, with
all her guessing, for if he was put to the proof she herself was not
left undissected. It came back to him again and again that if the
documents he had burned proved anything they proved that Sir Dominick
Ferrand's human errors were not all of one order. The woman he loved
was the daughter of her father, he couldn't get over that. What was
more to the point was that as he came to know her better and better--
for they did work together under Mr. Morrish's protection--his
affection was a quantity still less to be neglected. He sometimes