"You know I won't hurry you or
interrupt you, but you must--you really must-tell me everything. Don't
leave out the slightest detail."
"I won't," he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was
keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of
meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.
"You can imagine," he said, "what a sensation the swooning made, and the
commotion that followed it."
"Yes, I can imagine that," she answered. But she was yet so faithful
that she would not ask him to go on.
He continued, unasked, "I don't know just how, now, to account for its
coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown
correspondent. I suppose I've always unconsciously expected to meet that
girl, and Miss Andrews's hypothetical case was psychologically so
parallel--"
"Yes, yes!"
"And I've sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly--that it was
a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import."
"I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But--"
"And I don't believe now that the hypothetical case brought any
intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted
from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still
weak from the sickness she had been through--too weak to bear the strain
of the work she had taken up.
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