Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he
was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the
passing moment.
"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned, with the
straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening
to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come to
me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I
am beginning to get interested we are interrupted. In the morning, at
some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you
for weeks and weeks. What have you been doing?"
"I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the
gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make
other people practise it."
"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As
to the other, I don't know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe
that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and
at other times I'm afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead
me. Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the
'practical-politics' armory to get my weapons."
There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she
made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
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