Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/322

THE BETTER SORT "And he's gone?" Mr. Hayes permitted himself to inquire.

"He's gone."

"It's over?" Isabel hoarsely asked.

"It's over."

"Then we go?"

This it was that he enjoyed. "No, my dear; we stay."

There was fairly a triple gasp; relief took time to operate. "Then why did he, come?"

"In the fulness of his kind heart and of Their discussed and decreed satisfaction. To express Their sense!"

Mr. Hayes broke into a laugh, but his wife wanted to know. "Of the grand work you're doing?"

"Of the way I polish it off. They're most handsome about it. The receipts, it appears, speak"

He was nursing his effect; Isabel intently watched him, and the others hung on his lips. "Yes, speak?"

"Well, volumes. They tell the truth."

At this Mr. Hayes laughed again. "Oh, they at least do?"

Near him thus, once more, Gedge knew their intelligence as one—which was so good a consciousness to get back that his tension now relaxed as by the snap of a spring and he felt his old face at ease. "So you can't say," he continued, "that we don't want it."

"I bow to it," the young man smiled. "It's what I said then. It's great."

"It's great," said Morris Gedge. "It couldn't be greater."

His wife still watched him; her irony hung behind. "Then we're just as we were?"

"No, not as we were."

She jumped at it. "Better?"

"Better. They give us a rise." 310