Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/390

FORDHAM CASTLE you," Abel said—"is that it doesn't do for me either to be heard or seen. I haven't got any side—!" But it dropped; it was too old a story.

"Not any possible side at all?" his friend, in her candour, doubtingly echoed. "Why what do they want over there?"

It made him give a comic pathetic wail. "Ah to know a person who says such things as that to me, and to have to give her up!"

She appeared to consider with a certain alarm what this might portend, and she really fell back before it. "Would you think I'd be able to give up Mattie?"

"Why not—if she's successful? The thing you wouldn't like—you wouldn't, I'm sure—would be to give her up if she should find, or if you should find, she wasn't."

"Well, I guess Mattie will be successful," said Mrs. Magaw.

"Ah you're a worshipper of success!" he groaned. "I'd give Mrs. Taker up, definitely, just to remain C. P. Addard with you."

She allowed it her thought; but, as he felt, super ficially. "She's your wife, sir, you know, whatever you do."

"'Mine'? Ah but whose? She isn't C. P. Addard's."

She rose at this as if they were going too far; yet she showed him, he seemed to see, the first little concession—which was indeed to be the only one—of her inner timidity; something that suggested how she must have preserved as a token, laid away among spotless properties, the visiting-card he had originally handed her. "Well, I guess the one I feel for is Abel F. Taker!"

This, in the end, however, made no difference; since one of the things that inevitably came up between 370