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up. To make your mind nice and easy and as you were. And so, no doubt, if he's half the chap we both think he is, he would. But don't forget he'd have more than you on his mind. Having got the gist, been given the gist by you, of your and my little talk this evening, would you really expect him not to alter his course a bit--if it were only in one or two small particulars? His time-table would alter, and his beat--that could not not happen; it would be bound to. One or two of his haunts would miss his familiar face; he'd start cooling off one or two of his buddies, and so on. Not to veer a bit, it might be ever so slightly, would take more nerve than a man humanly has. I've never yet known a man not change his behaviour once he's known he's watched: it's exactly changes like that that are being watched for. No, _he'd__ let us know in an instant that he'd been tipped the wink: in which case, what? He'd be pulled in before anyone could say knife, before _he__ could tip the wink any further.... I should not say anything to him, if I were you." "Well, thank you. But what would there be to stop me saying to him, 'Go on just as you're going, but be careful. Be most careful to go on just as you've been going on'?" "Nothing, nothing at all," said Harrison promptly. He shrugged his shoulders. "In that case, you're taking a chance on how well you know him .7 speak, of course, merely as an outsider. It's clear to me he's got quite his share of nerve--but this would take more; it would take tiptop acting. How much of an actor would you, now, take him to be?" She flinched, oddly. "Actor? How should I of all people know? He has never had any reason to act with me." "No," he said thoughtfully. "No, I suppose not." "No." "I should say, if a chap _were__ able to act in love, he'd be enough of an actor to get away with anything." "I--I suppose so," she said, turning away her head. Harrison, having waited, all the more quickly said: "We can leave it, he's no sort of an actor." It was just not a question. Nothing could be more telling than this show of his of compunction, muffled compunction, at having touched her on what could conceivably be the raw. By, next, renewing an awkward silence he made apparent to her what she had made apparent to him--that, out of the whole of a conversation abhorrent and shocking to her from the very start, it took one remark to get her under the skin. Lips compressed, as though he had taken refuge in silent humming, Harrison meanwhile looked round the room which should so well know the person under discussion. He looked, in fact, everywhere but at Stella. Finally he said: "As to all that, though, I'm naturally off" my ground. All I mean is, I should feel bad if I let you ruin the chap. A chap is quite often ruined, I shouldn't wonder, by someone's expecting too much of him. Of course, I can't make you take my advice--I quite see that my position in the whole matter may seem a bit funny? I more or less come and say to you, 'Better liquidate Robert.' But that means just as a friend, be it understood. Otherwise, I haven't a thing against him. You say, no, he can't act up. Ought you, then, to take such a cracking risk?" "Risk of telling him what you've told me? Perhaps not," she said, so amenably that he looked at her with suspicion. He was right, she had not been listening--or not completely. Thinking off at a tangent, she had arrived at a point which, it really seemed, made it unnecessary to listen to Harrison any longer or ever again. Her eyes now sought and insisted on meeting his with a quite new dark and embattled glitter. "Your position funny? But you've been so kind--you've thought of me, Robert, everyone but yourself: surely now it's time we thought about you. Are you not the one who's taking rather a risk,--if you _are__ really what you imply you are? For all I know, you may be--indeed, why not? You're not to be accounted for in any other way: I cannot believe you spend your whole day sitting in the park; you