Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/399

THE PAPERS put his question for him. They forgave her, she judged, for having so oddly forsaken him, but they appealed to her now not to leave him to struggle alone. Her own difficulty was, however, meanwhile, that she feared to serve him as he suggested without too much, by way of return, turning his case to the comic; whereby she only looked at him hard and let him revert to their friend. "Oh," he said, with a rich wistfulness from which the comic was not absent, "of course everyone can't pretend to be Beadel."

"Perfectly. But we're speaking, after all, of those who do count."

There was quite a hush, for the minute, while the poor man faltered. "Should you say that I—in any appreciable way—count?"

Howard Bight distilled honey. "Isn't it a little a question of how much we should find you did, or, for that matter, might, as it were, be made to, in the event of a real catastrophe?"

Mr. Marshal turned pale, yet he met it too with sweetness. "I like the way"—and he had a glance for Maud "you talk of catastrophes!"

His host did the comment justice. "Oh, it's only because, you see, we're so peculiarly in the presence of one. Beadel shows so tremendously what a catastrophe does for the right person. His absence, you may say, doubles, quintuples, his presence."

"I see, I see!" Mr. Marshal was all there. "It's awfully interesting to be so present. And yet it's rather dreadful to be so absent." It had set him fairly musing; for couldn't the opposites be reconciled? "If he is," he threw out, "absent!"

"Why, he's absent, of course," said Bight, "if he's dead."

"And really dead is what you believe him to be?" He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind 387