Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/118

106 All his wondering attention for a moment hung upon her. "Do you ask me, Mora, to do something for you?"

"Yes"—and it was as if no "good creature" had ever been so beautiful, nor any beautiful creature ever so good—"to make him your care. To see that he does get it."

"Get it?" Traffle blankly echoed.

"Why, what you promised him. My aunt's money."

He felt his countenance an exhibition. "She promised it, Mora, to you."

"If I married him, yes—because I wasn't fit for her to speak to till I should. But if I'm now proudly Mrs Puddick—"

He had already, however, as with an immense revulsion, a long jump, taken her up: "You are, you are—? "He gaped at the difference it made, and in which then, immensely, they seemed to recover her.

"Before all men—and the Registrar."

"The Registrar?" he again echoed; so that, with another turn of her humour, it made her lift her eyebrows at him.

"You mean it doesn't hold if that's the way—?"

"It holds, Mora, I suppose, any way—that makes a real marriage. It is," he hopefully smiled, "real?"

"Could anything be more real," she asked, "than to have become such a thing?"

"Walter Puddick's wife?" He kept his eyes on