Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/385

FORDHAM CASTLE "Oh Mrs. Taker knows—you can bet your life," he laughed, "on that. It seems to be somewhere in London or in the country round, and I daresay it's the same place as your daughter's. Once she's there, as I understand it, she'll be all right; but she has got to get there—that is to be seen there thoroughly fixed and photographed, and have it in all the papers—first. After she's fixed, she says, we'll talk. We have talked a good deal: when Mrs. Taker says 'We'll talk' I know what she means. But this time we'll have it out."

There were communities in their fate that made his friend turn pale. "Do you mean she won't want you to come?"

"Well, for me to 'come,' don't you see? will be for me to come to life. How can I come to life when I've been as dead as I am now?"

Mrs. Vanderplank looked at him with a dim delicacy. "But surely, sir, I'm not conversing with the remains!"

"You're conversing with C. P. Addard. He may be alive but even this I don't know yet; I'm just trying him," he said: "I'm trying him, Mrs. Magaw, on you. Abel Taker's in his grave, but does it strike you that Mr. Addard is at all above ground?"

He had smiled for the slightly gruesome joke of it, but she looked away as if it made her uneasy. Then, however, as she came back to him, "Are you going to wait here?" she asked.

He held her, with some gallantry, in suspense. "Are you?"

She postponed her answer, visibly not quite comfortable now; but they were inevitably the next day up to their necks again in the question; and then it was that she expressed more of her sense of her situation. "Certainly I feel as if I must wait—as long as I have to wait. Mattie likes this place—I mean she 365