Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/387

FORDHAM CASTLE having so even more remarkably bumped together under Madame Massin's tilleuls, shouldn't only make them reach out to each other across their queer coil of communications, cut so sharp off in other quarters, but should prevent their pretending to any real consciousness but that of their ordeal. It was Abel's idea, promptly enough expressed to Mrs. Magaw, that they ought to get something out of it; but when he had said that a few times over (the first time she had met it in silence), she finally replied, and in a manner that he thought quite sublime: "Well, we shall—if they do all they want. We shall feel we've helped. And it isn't so very much to do."

"You think it isn't so very much to do—to lie down and die for them?"

"Well, if I don't hate it any worse when I'm really dead—!" She took herself up, however, as if she had skirted the profane. "I don't say that if I didn't believe in Mat—! But I do believe, you see. That's where she has me."

"Oh I see more or less. That's where Sue has me."

Mrs. Magaw fixed him with a milder solemnity. "But what has Mrs. Taker against you?"

"It's sweet of you to ask," he smiled; while it really came to him that he was living with her under ever so much less strain than what he had been feeling for ever so long before from Sue. Wouldn't he have liked it to go on and on—wouldn't that have suited C. P. Addard? He seemed to be finding out who C. P. Addard was—so that it came back again to the way Sue fixed things. She had fixed them so that C. P. Addard could become quite interested in Mrs. Vanderplank and quite soothed by her and so that Mrs. Vanderplank as well, wonderful to say, had lost her impatience for Mattie's summons a good deal more, he was sure, than she confessed. It was 367