Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/150

144 shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely, after all, just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to an almsgiver who only fumbled. She hadn't taken the sovereigns, but she would take the penny. She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. 'Don't put yourself out any longer,' he would say, 'for so bad a case. You've done all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives take us. I don't know much—though I have really been interested—about yours; but I suppose you've got one. Mine, at any rate, will take me—and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.' And then once more, for the sweetest, faintest flower of all: 'Only, I say—see here!' She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would decline to 'see there,' decline, as she might say, to see anywhere or anything. Yet it befell that just