Part 17

She had come nearer with it, as if he might rise for some show of express separation; but he only leaned back motionless, his eyes on her now--he kept her a moment before him. “Do you mean that we don’t--that we don’t--?” But he broke down.

“Do I ‘mean’--?” She remained as for questions he might ask, but it was wellnigh as if there played through her dotty veil an irrepressible irony for that particular one. “I’ve meant, for long years, I think, all I’m capable of meaning. I’ve meant so much that I can’t mean more. So there it is.”

“But if you go,” he appealed--and with a sense as of final flatness, however he arranged it, for his own attitude--“but if you go sha’n’t I see you again?”

She waited a little, and it was strangely for him now as if--though at last so much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with his--something still depended on her. “Do you like to see me?” she very simply asked.

At this he did get up; that was easier than to say--at least with responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his utmost, in some air of assurance, he slipped into the inner pocket of his coat, letting it settle there securely. “You’re too wonderful.” But he frowned at her with it as never in his life. “Where does it all come from?”

“The wonder of poor me?” Kate Cookham said. “It comes from you.”

He shook his head slowly--feeling, with his letter there against his heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. “I mean so much money--so extraordinarily much.”

Well, she held him a while blank. “Does it seem to you extraordinarily much--twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know,” she added, “it’s all.”

“It’s enough!” he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness somehow on his cheek.

“It’s enough? Thank you then!” she rather oddly went on.

He shifted a little his posture. “It was more than a hundred a year--for you to get together.”

“Yes,” she assented, “that was what year by year I tried for.”

“But that you could live all the while and save that--!” Yes, he was at liberty, as he hadn’t been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered--and didn’t the change mean that here again was the social relation?

“Ah, I didn’t live as you saw me the other day.”

“Yes,” he answered--and didn’t he the next instant feel he must fairly have smiled with it?--“the other day you were going it!”

“For once in my life,” said Kate Cookham. “I’ve left the hotel,” she after a moment added.

“Ah, you’re in--a--lodgings?” he found himself inquiring as for positive sociability.

She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to give him. “Yes--but far of course from here. Up on the hill.” To which, after another instant, “At The Mount, Castle Terrace,” she subjoined.

“Oh, I know The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice.”

“Awfully sunny and nice,” Kate Cookham took from him.

“So that if it isn’t,” he pursued, “like the Royal, why you’re at least comfortable.”

“I shall be comfortable anywhere now,” she replied with a certain dryness.

It was astonishing, however, what had become of his own. “Because I’ve accepted----?”

“Call it that!” she dimly smiled.

“I hope then at any rate,” he returned, “you can now thoroughly rest” He spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to feel was that since he “accepted” he mustn’t, for his last note, have accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn’t but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the dotty veil didn’t disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at least on his part On hers, on hers it was--as he had so often for a week had reflectively to pronounce things--another affair. Ah, somehow, both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded--yet in a sense so strangely enshrouded in things she didn’t tell him. What must she, what mustn’t she, have done? What she had said--and she had really told him nothing--was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could do, he himself now considerably floundered. “But I can’t think--I can’t think----!”

“You can’t think I can have made so much money in the time and been honest?”

“Oh, you’ve been honest!” Herbert Dodd distinctly allowed.

It moved her stillness to a gesture--which, however, she had as promptly checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to his failure of thought. “Everything was possible, under my stress, with my hatred.”