"I suppose not," agreed Lettice, who was, as has been said, a dandy in affairs of honor. She made her funny little pause to collect words before she got rid of her next speech. "I suppose if it had gone any further we should have heard by now."
"The prison people would have let us know."
"Why, if he'd been ill, or gone off his head, or anything of that sort."
"You think there's a danger of his going off his head?"
"Well, that's what you're talking about, isn't it?"
"No," said Denis, "I'd not got so far as that." He regarded her thoughtfully. "I wish you'd tell me how it strikes you, Lettice. I can't see my way at all."
"There's nothing to tell," said Lettice, a trifle restless at being asked to explain the obvious. "He must have been off his balance to hit a warder, mustn't he? And when that begins, with anybody like him, you never know where it will stop. He isn't any too steady."
(Certainly there was no one like Lettice for pulling things off pedestals. Hitting a warder--it didn't sound nearly so bad as assaulting an officer!)
"Well, I've known Gardiner five and twenty years, and I'd never have called him unsteady. Hard as nails, more like."
"Well, of course he'd be hard so long as he hadn't anything to face he really minded, wouldn't he? And till this he didn't, did he? It's what you said yourself--he's always been lucky. But if you get him off his guard he's rather unusually sensitive. Look at the way he feels pain!"
"I never saw him feel pain. In my company he's always been brutally robust."
"Well, but can't you _tell_ he would, by the set of his lips?"
"No," said Denis, "I can't. I've not your imagination."
To this Lettice made no reply, unless one might count the slight derisive lift of her chin. She never would take up the personal question. She would never, if she could help it, say: "I thought." She was sometimes driven to say, "I did," but even then she kept to the bald facts, uncolored by her personality. Denis, shifting in his chair to a more convenient angle, continued to regard her with attention, in which now mingled some amusement.
"Oh ah," he said, "you were there when he damaged his hand, weren't you? I'd forgotten. How long was it you stayed on at Rochehaut after I left?"