Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/383

FORDHAM CASTLE which I think you ought to know." It was relevant to nothing, relevant only to the grope of their talk, broken with sudden silences where they stopped short for fear of mistakes; but as he put the card before her he held out to it the little momentary flame. And this was the way that, after a while and from one thing to another, he himself, in exchange for what he had to give and what he gave freely, heard all about "Mattie"—Mattie Magaw, Mrs. Vanderplank's beautiful and high-spirited daughter, who, as he learned, found her two names, so dreadful even singly, a combination not to be borne, and carried on a quarrel with them no less desperate than Sue's quarrel with—well, with everything. She had, quite as Sue had done, declared her need of a free hand to fight them, and she was, for all the world like Sue again, now fighting them to the death. This similarity of situation was wondrously completed by the fact that the scene of Miss Magaw's struggle was, as her mother explained, none other than that uppermost walk of "high" English life which formed the present field of Mrs. Taker's operations; a circumstance on which Abel presently produced his comment. "Why, if they're after the same thing in the same place, I wonder if we shan't hear of their meeting."

Mrs. Magaw appeared for a moment to wonder too. "Well, if they do meet I guess we'll hear. I will say for Mattie that she writes me pretty fully. And I presume," she went on, "Mrs. Taker keeps you posted?"

"No," he had to confess—"I don't hear from her in much detail. She knows I back her," Abel smiled, "and that's enough for her. 'You be quiet and I'll let you know when you're wanted'—that's her motto; I'm to wait, wherever I am, till I'm called for. But I guess she won't be in a hurry to call for me"—this reflexion he showed he was 363