Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/178



piece of strategy left me staring and I confess it made me rather angry. My only consolation was that Archie, when I told him, looked as blank as myself and that the trick touched him more nearly, for I was not in love with Louisa. We agreed that we required an explanation and we pretended to expect one the next day in the shape of a letter satisfactory even to the point of being apologetic. When I say 'we' pretended I mean that I did, for my suspicion that he knew (through an arrangement with Linda) what had become of our friends lasted only a moment. If his resentment was less than my own his surprise was equally great. I had been willing to bolt, but I felt rather slighted by the facility with which Mrs. Pallant had shown that she could part with us. Archie was not angry, because in the first place he was good-natured and in the second it was evidently not definite to him that he had been encouraged, having, I think, no very particular idea of what constituted encouragement. He was fresh from the wonderful country in which between the ingenuous young there may be so little question of intentions. He was but dimly conscious of his own and would have had no opinion as to