"It's the very string," he said, "that my pearls are strung on!"
The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn't want to
give us a grain of succour--our density was a thing too perfect in
its way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending on it, and
if the spell was to break it must break by some force of its own.
He comes back to me from that last occasion--for I was never to
speak to him again--as a man with some safe preserve for sport. I
wondered as I walked away where he had got HIS tip.



CHAPTER V.



When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he
made me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an
insult. He had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen's ardent
response was in itself a pledge of discretion. The question would
now absorb them and would offer them a pastime too precious to be
shared with the crowd. They appeared to have caught instinctively
at Vereker's high idea of enjoyment. Their intellectual pride,
however, was not such as to make them indifferent to any further
light I might throw on the affair they had in hand. They were
indeed of the "artistic temperament," and I was freshly struck with
my colleague's power to excite himself over a question of art.
He'd call it letters, he'd call it life, but it was all one thing.
In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally
for Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently
better to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of