Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/126

114 that young woman was actually cultivating; in accordance with which the next broadest base for her exclusive command of the situation—and she clearly claimed nothing else—would be the fact that Walter Puddick had been with her and that she had had him (and to the tune of odd revelry withal, to which their disordered and unremoved cups glaringly testified) all to herself. Such an interview with him as had so uplifted her that she distractedly had failed to ring for the parlour-maid, with six o'clock ebbing in strides,—this did tell a story, Traffle ruefully recognized, with which it might well verily yet be given her to work on him. He was promptly to feel, none the less, how he carried the war across her border, poor superficial thing, when he decided on the direct dash that showed her she had still to count with him.

He didn't offer her, as he looked about, the mere obvious "I see you've had visitors, or a visitor, and have smoked a pipe with them and haven't bored yourself the least mite;"—he broke straight into: "He has come out here again then, the wretch, and you've done him more justice? You've done him a good deal, my dear," he laughed in the grace of his advantage, "if you've done him even half as much as he appears to have done your tea-table!" For this the quick flash-light of his imagination—that's what it was for her to have married an imaginative man—was just the drop of a flying-machine into her castle court while she stood on guard at the