alone with you?"

"I hope you'd like to be alone with me! I would like nothing better. But
if we walk up and down together on the path in full view, we arouse no
suspicion and we can't be overheard. I propose to tell some secrets."

Not many women would resist the temptation of inside political information.
Recognizing that by some means beyond her comprehension she
was being drawn into a maze of secrets all interrelated and any of them
likely to involve herself at any minute, Tess had no compunction whatever.

"I'll be frank with you," she said. "I'm curious."

Once they walked up the path and down again, talking of dogs, because
it happened that Tom Tripe's enormous beast was sprawling in the
shadow of a rose-bush at the farther end. The commissioner did not
like dogs. "Something loathsome about them--degrading--especially
the big ones." She disagreed. She liked them, cold wet noses and all,
even in the dark. Tom Tripe, stepping behind a bush with the obvious
purpose of smoking in secret the clay pipe that be hardly troubled to
conceal, whistled the dog, who leapt into life as if stung and joined his master.

The second time up and down they talked of professional beggars and
what a problem they are to India, because they both happened as they
turned to catch sight of Umra with the one eye, entering through the
little gate in the wall and shuffling without modesty or a moment's
hesitation to his favorite seat among the shrubs, whence to view
proceedings undisturbed.

"Those three beggars that haunt this house seem to claim all our