Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/139

Rh "Abandon Puddick? Who the deuce then ever said you must?"

"Didn't you a little," she blandly inquired, "all the while you were so great on our not 'interfering'?"

"I was great—if great you call it—only," he returned, "so far as I was great for our just a little understanding."

"Well, what I'm telling you is that I think I do at present just a little understand."

"And doesn't it make you feel just a little badly?"

"No"—she serenely shook her head; "for my intention was so good. He does justice now," she explained, "to my intention; or he will very soon—he quite let me see that, and it's why I'm what you call 'happy.' With which," she wound up, "there's so much more I can still do. There are bad days, you see, before him—and then he'll have only me. For if she was respectable," Jane proceeded, reverting as imperturbably to their question of a while back, "she's certainly not nice now."

He'd be hanged, Traffle said to himself, if he wouldn't look at her hard. "Do you mean by not coming to thank you?" And then as she but signified by a motion that this she had now made her terms with: "What else then is the matter with her?"

"The matter with her," said Jane on the note of high deliberation and competence, and not without a certain pity for his own want of light, "the matter