Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/142

130 how he has seen our attitude, or at any rate mine. I was stupid the other day when he came—he saw but a part of it then. It's settled," she further mentioned, "that I shall go to him."

"Go to him—?" Traffle blankly echoed.

"At his studio, dear, you know," Jane promptly supplied. "I want to see his work—for we had some talk about that too. He has made me care for it."

Her companion took these things in—even so many of them as there now seemed to be: they somehow left him, in point of fact, so stranded. "Why not call on her at once?"

"That will be useless when she won't receive me. Never, never!" said Jane with a sigh so confessedly superficial that her husband found it peculiarly irritating.

"He has brought that 'home' to you?" he consequently almost jibed.

She winced no more, however, than if he had tossed her a flower. "Ah, what he has made me realize is that if he has definitely lost her, as he feels, so we ourselves assuredly have, for ever and a day. But he doesn't mean to lose sight of her, and in that way—"

"In that way?"—Traffle waited.

"Well, I shall always hear whatever there may be. And there's no knowing," she developed as with an open and impartial appetite, "what that mayn't come to."

He turned away—with his own conception of this