Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/172

166 perhaps, to take it up. 'Don't people as good as love their friends when they "trust" them?'

It pulled up a little the eulogist of Mr. Drake. 'Well, my dear, I love you'

'But you don't trust me?' the girl unmercifully asked.

Again Mrs. Jordan paused still she looked queer. 'Yes,' she replied with a certain austerity; 'that 's exactly what I 'm about to give you rather a remarkable proof of.' The sense of its being remarkable was already so strong that, while she bridled a little, this held her auditor in a momentary muteness of submission. 'Mr. Drake has rendered his lordship, for several years, services that his lordship has highly appreciated and that make it all the more—a—unexpected that they should, perhaps a little suddenly, separate.'

'Separate?' Our young lady was mystified, but she tried to be interested; and she already saw that she had put the saddle on the wrong horse. She had heard something of Mr. Drake, who was a member of his lordship's circle—the