"Well, don't you set store upon Clarissa?"
"Clarissa is exquisite; but her mother didn't mention her in offering me this recompense."
Susy lifted her head again. "Whom did she mention?"
"Vanderlyn," said Lansing.
"Vanderlyn? Nelson?"
"Yes--and some letters ... something about letters .... What is it, my dear, that you and I have been hired to hide from Vanderlyn? Because I should like to know," Nick broke out savagely, "if we've been adequately paid."
Susy was silent: she needed time to reckon up her forces, and study her next move; and her brain was in such a whirl of fear that she could at last only retort: "What is it that Ellie said to you?"
Lansing laughed again. "That's just what you'd like to find out--isn't it?--in order to know the line to take in ****** your explanation."
The sneer had an effect that he could not have foreseen, and that Susy herself had not expected.
"Oh, don't--don't let us speak to each other like that!" she cried; and sinking down by the dressing-table she hid her face in her hands.
It seemed to her, now, that nothing mattered except that their love for each other, their faith in each other, should be saved from some unhealable hurt. She was willing to tell Nick everything--she wanted to tell him everything--if only she could be sure of reaching a responsive chord in him. But the scene of the cigars came back to her, and benumbed her. If only she could make him see that nothing was of any account as long as they continued to love each other!
His touch fell compassionately on her shoulder. "Poor child-- don't," he said.
Their eyes met, but his expression checked the smile breaking through her tears. "Don't you see," he continued, "that we've got to have this thing out?"
She continued to stare at him through a prism of tears. "I can't--while you stand up like that," she stammered, childishly.
She had cowered down again into a corner of the lounge; but Lansing did not seat himself at her side. He took a chair facing her, like a caller on the farther side of a stately tea- tray. "Will that do?" he asked with a stiff smile, as if to humour her.
"Nothing will do--as long as you're not you!"
"Not me?"
She shook her head wearily. "What's the use? You accept things theoretically--and then when they happen ...."
"What things? What has happened!"
A sudden impatience mastered her. What did he suppose, after all--? "But you know all about Ellie. We used to talk about her often enough in old times," she said.
"Ellie and young Davenant?"
"Young Davenant; or the others ...."
"Or the others. But what business was it of ours?"
"Ah, that's just what I think!" she cried, springing up with an explosion of relief. Lansing stood up also, but there was no answering light in his face.
"We're outside of all that; we've nothing to do with it, have we?" he pursued.
"Nothing whatever."
"Then what on earth is the meaning of Ellie's gratitude?
Gratitude for what we've done about some letters--and about Vanderlyn?"
"Oh, not you," Susy cried, involuntarily.
"Not I? Then you?" He came close and took her by the wrist.
"Answer me. Have you been mixed up in some dirty business of Ellie's?"
There was a pause. She found it impossible to speak, with that burning grasp on the wrist where the bangle had been. At length he let her go and moved away. "Answer," he repeated.
"I've told you it was my business and not yours."
He received this in silence; then he questioned: "You've been sending letters for her, I suppose? To whom?"
"Oh, why do you torment me? Nelson was not supposed to know that she'd been away. She left me the letters to post to him once a week. I found them here the night we arrived .... It was the price--for this. Oh, Nick, say it's been worth it-say at least that it's been worth it!" she implored him.
He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her dressing-table, ****** the jewelled bangle dance.
"How many letters?"
"I don't know ... four ... five ... What does it matter?"
"And once a week, for six weeks--?"
"Yes."
"And you took it all as a matter of course?"
"No: I hated it. But what could I do?"
"What could you do?"
"When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think I'd give you up?"
"Give me up?" he echoed.
"Well--doesn't our being together depend on--on what we can get out of people? And hasn't there always got to be some give-and- take? Did you ever in your life get anything for nothing?" she cried with sudden exasperation. "You've lived among these people as long as I have; I suppose it's not the first time--"
"By God, but it is," he exclaimed, flushing. "And that's the difference--the fundamental difference."
"The difference!"
"Between you and me. I've never in my life done people's dirty work for them--least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or you wouldn't have hidden this beastly business from me."
