Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/437

THE PAPERS But Bight took him up. "She did believe—so that she might punish me."

"Punish you?"

Maud raised her hand at her friend. "He doesn't understand."

He was indeed, Mr. Marshal, fully pathetic now. "No, I don't understand. Not a wee bit."

"Well," said Bight kindly, "we none of us do. We must give it up."

"You think I really must?"

"You, sir," Bight smiled, "most of all. The places seem so taken."

His client, however, clung. "He won't die again?"

"If he does he'll again come to life. He'll never die. Only we shall die. He's immortal."

He looked up and down, this inquirer; he listened to the howl of the Strand, not yet, as happened, brought nearer to them by one of the hawkers. And yet it was as if, overwhelmed by his lost chance, he knew himself too weak even for their fond aid. He still therefore appealed. "Will this be a boom for him?"

"His return? Colossal. For—fancy!—it was exactly what we talked of, you remember, the other day, as the ideal. I mean," Bight smiled, "for a man to be lost, and yet at the same time"

"To be found?" poor Marshal too hungrily mused.

"To be boomed," Bight continued, "by his smash and yet never to have been too smashed to know how he was booming."

It was wonderful for Maud too. "To have given it all up, and yet to have it all."

"Oh, better than that," said her friend: "to have more than all, and more than you gave up. Beadel," he was careful to explain to their companion, "will have more."

Mr. Marshal struggled with it. "More than if he were dead?" 425