Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/65

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE VI

When Mr. Brookenham appeared his wife was prompt. "She's coming back for Lord Petherton."

"Oh!" he simply said.

"There's something between them."

"Oh!" he merely repeated. But it would have taken many such sounds on his part to represent a spirit of response discernible to any one but his wife.

"There have been things before," she went on, "but I haven't felt sure. Don't you know how one has sometimes a flash?"

It could not be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend, for sitting down, more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this or anything else. He had a pale, cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted gray eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein's English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than even his extreme exposure, or anybody's study of the problem, had yet made possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it might have been a summary, or an explanation, of the things he had always not said, but there was something in him that had long since pacified impatience and drugged curiosity. He had never in his life answered such a question as his wife had just put 55