Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/360

 edge"; you felt him always possessed of a certain impatience or of an expectancy for something ahead, of an hour to come. That was gone from him now; here he was at the table with her; and she thought, "He's taking things as they happen." And she did not like something about this; it was not him. She thought, "He's been hit awfully hard by Billy's death and by his fright about me."

But this did not satisfactorily explain her feeling of the absence of an attitude which previously had characterized him. She thought, "It's because he has given up something." When she set herself to selecting what that was, she could come upon but one adequate answer; it was because he had given up Mrs. Russell. And when Marjorie thought this, there ought to have been more gratification in it for her than there was.

Only now—and only with slowness, now that it was established and she could observe it—did she discern that what she had brought about by all she had done, and what had been brought about by Billy's death, was a negation for her father; they had imposed simply a shalt not when, for the companionship forbidden, he could turn to—what?