Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/178

THE BETTER SORT It will be for that, mind, I quite recognise—because Addie is superior—as well as for all you aren't. So good-bye."

He remained, however, till the next day, and noted at intervals the different stages of their friend's journey; the hour, this time, she would really have started, the hour she would reach Dover, the hour she would get to town, where she would alight at Mrs. Dunn's. Perhaps she would bring Mrs. Dunn, for Mrs. Dunn would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow, as if in anticipation of this, stillness settled between them; he became as silent as his hostess. But before he went she brought out, shyly and anxiously, as an appeal, the question that, for hours, had clearly been giving her thought. "Do you meet her then to-night in London?"

"Dear, no. In what position am I, alas! to do that? When can I ever meet her again?" He had turned it all over. "If I could meet Addie after this, you know, I could meet you. And if I do meet Addie," he lucidly pursued, "what will happen, by the same stroke, is that I shall meet you. And that's just what I've explained to you that I dread."

"You mean that she and I will be inseparable?"

He hesitated. "I mean that she'll tell me all about you. I can hear her, and her ravings, now."

She gave again—and it was infinitely sad—her little whinnying laugh. "Oh, but if what you say is true, you'll know."

"Ah, but Addie won't! Won't, I mean, know that I know—or at least won't believe it. Won't believe that anyone knows. Such," he added, with a strange, smothered sigh, "is Addie. Do you know," he wound up, "that what, after all, has most definitely happened is that you've made me see her as I've never done before?"

She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired. 166