Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/386

FORDHAM CASTLE likes it for me. It seems the right sort of place," she opined with her perpetual earnest emphasis.

But it made him sound again the note. "The right sort to pass for dead in?"

"Oh she doesn't want me to pass for dead."

"Then what does she want you to pass for?"

The poor lady cast about. "Well, only for Mrs. Vanderplank."

"And who or what is Mrs. Vanderplank?"

Mrs. Magaw considered this personage, but didn't get far. "She isn't any one in particular, I guess."

"That means," Abel returned, "that she isn't alive."

"She isn't more than half alive," Mrs. Magaw conceded. "But it isn't what I am—it's what I'm passing for. Or rather"—she worked it out—"what I'm just not. I'm not passing—I don't, can't here, where it doesn't matter, you see—for her mother."

Abel quite fell in. "Certainly she doesn't want to have any mother."

"She doesn't want to have me. She wants me to lay low. If I lay low, she says"

"Oh I know what she says"—Abel took it straight up. "It's the very same as what Mrs. Taker says. If you lie low she can fly high."

It kept disconcerting her in a manner, as well as steadying, his free possession of their case. "I don't feel as if I was lying—I mean as low as she wants—when I talk to you so." She broke it off thus, and again and again, anxiously, responsibly; her sense of responsibility making Taker feel, with his braver projection of humour, quite ironic and sardonic; but as for a week, for a fortnight, for many days more, they kept frequently and intimately meeting, it was natural that the so extraordinary fact of their being, as he put it, in the same sort of box, and of their boxes 366