Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/377

FORDHAM CASTLE : news of her progress in fact—her progress on from Fordham Castle, if anything could be higher—would not improbably be contained in the unopened letter he had lately pocketed.

There was a given moment at luncheon meanwhile, in his talk with his countrywoman, where he did try that flap of the wing—did throw off, for a flight into the blue, the first falsehood he could think of. "I stopped in Italy, you see, on my way back from the East, where I had gone—to Constantinople"—he rose actually to Constantinople—"to visit Mrs. Addard's grave." And after they had all come out to coffee in the rustling shade, with the vociferous German tribe at one end of the terrace, the English family keeping silence with an English accent, as it struck him, in the middle, and his direction taken, by his new friend's side, to the other unoccupied corner, he found himself oppressed with what he had on his hands, the burden of keeping up this expensive fiction. He had never been to Constantinople—it could easily be proved against him; he ought to have thought of something better, have got his effect on easier terms. Yet a funnier thing still than this quick repentance was the quite equally fictive ground on which his companion had affected him—when he came to think of it—as meeting him.

"Why you know that's very much the same errand that took me to Rome. I visited the grave of my daughter—whom I lost there some time ago."

She had turned her face to him after making this statement, looked at him with an odd blink of her round kind plain eyes, as if to see how he took it. He had taken it on the spot, for this was the only thing to do; but he had felt how much deeper down he was himself sinking as he replied: "Ah it's a sad pleasure, isn't it? But those are places one doesn't want to neglect." 357