Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/119

Rh her pleadingly. "Surely, Mora, it's a good thing—clever and charming as he is." Now that Jane had succeeded, his instinct, of a sudden, was to back her up.

Mrs Puddick's face—and the fact was it was strange, in the light of her actual aspect, to think of her and name her so—showed, however, as ready a disposition. "If he's as much as that, then why were you so shocked by my relations with him?"

He panted—he cast about. "Why, we didn't doubt of his distinction—of what it was at any rate likely to become."

"You only doubted of mine?" she asked with her harder look.

He threw up helpless arms, he dropped them while he gazed at her. "It doesn't seem to me possible any one can ever have questioned your gift for doing things in your own way. And if you're now married," he added with his return of tentative presumption and his strained smile, "your own way opens out for you, doesn't it? as never yet."

Her eyes, on this, held him a moment, and he couldn't have said now what was in them. "I think it does. I'm seeing," she said—"I shall see. Only"—she hesitated but for an instant—"for that it's necessary you shall look after him."

They stood there face to face on it—during a pause that, lighted by her radiance, gave him time to take from her, somehow, larger and stranger