"But our friend," she asked,
"hasn't then told you?"
"He has told me nothing."
"Well, it has come with rather a rush--all in a very few days; and
hasn't moreover yet taken a form that permits an announcement. It's
only for you--absolutely you alone--that I speak; I so want you to
know." The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of his
disembarkment, of being further and further "in," treated him again
at this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way of her
putting him in there continued to be something exquisitely
remorseless. "Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he MUST accept.
He has proposed half a dozen things--each one more impossible than
the other; and he wouldn't have found this if he lives to a hundred.
Chad found it," she continued with her lighted, faintly flushed,
her conscious confidential face, "in the quietest way in the world.
Or rather it found HIM--for everything finds him; I mean finds
him right. You'll think we do such things strangely--but at my age,"
she smiled, "one has to accept one's conditions. Our young man's people
had seen her; one of his sisters, a charming woman--we know all
about them--had observed her somewhere with me. She had spoken
to her brother--turned him on; and we were again observed, poor Jeanne
and I, without our in the least knowing it.
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