Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/69

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE He looked at her as if her vagueness might be assumed. "No. They, I take it, are not quite so 'cordial' to him, as you call it, as the old ladies. He gets it from Mitchy."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Brookenham. "Are you very sure?" she then demanded.

He had got up and put his empty cup back upon the tea-table, wandering afterwards a little about the room and looking out, as his wife had done half an hour before, at the dreary rain and the now duskier ugliness. He reverted in this attitude, with a complete unconsciousness of making for irritation, to a question they might be supposed to have dropped. "He'll have a lovely drive for his money!" His companion, however, said nothing, and he presently came round again. "No, I'm not absolutely sure—of his having had it from Mitchy. If I were, I should do something."

"What would you do?" She put it as if she couldn't possibly imagine.

"I would speak to him."

"To Harold?"

"No—that might just put it into his head." Brookenham walked up and down a little with his hands in his pockets; then, with a complete concealment of the steps of the transition, "Where are we dining to-night?" he brought out.

"Nowhere, thank Heaven. We grace our own board."

"Oh—with those fellows, as you said, and Jane?"

"That's not for dinner. The Baggers and Mary Pinthorpe and—upon my word I forget."

"You'll see when she comes," suggested Brookenham, who was again at the window.

"It isn't a she—it's two or three he's, I think," his wife replied with her indifferent anxiety. "But I don't know what dinner it is," she bethought herself; "it may be the one that's after Easter. Then that one's this one," she added with her eyes once more on her book. 59