Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/441

THE PAPERS "Oh, yes, Mrs. Chorner; we luckily invented her."

"Well, if she drove him to his death?"

Bight, with a laugh, caught at it. "Is that it? Did she drive him?"

It pulled her up, and, though she smiled, they stood again, a little, as on their guard. "Now, at any rate," Maud simply said at last, "she'll marry him. So you see how right I was."

With a preoccupation that had grown in him, however, he had already lost the thread. "How right?"

"Not to sell my Talk."

"Oh yes,"—he remembered. "Quite right." But it all came to something else. "Whom will you marry?"

She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him. Then she turned them about the place and saw no hindrance, and then, further, bending with a tenderness in which she felt so transformed, so won to something she had never been before, that she might even, to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on together. "That, at least," she said, "we'll put in the Papers."