Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/178

166 note, after what he had been through: neither Mrs Folliott nor Florence Ash had so much as hinted or breathed to him that he might have incurred that praise. No wonder therefore he was now taken—with this fresh party's instant suspicion and imputation of it though it was indeed for some minutes next as if each tried to see which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetration. Mark was so struck, in a word, with the extraordinarily straight guess Winch had had there in reserve for him that, other quick impressions helping, there was nothing for him but to bring out, himself: "There must be, my dear man, something rather wonderful the matter with you!" The quite more intensely and more irresistibly drawn grin, the quite unmistakably deeper consciousness in the dark, wide eye, that accompanied the not quite immediate answer to which remark he was afterward to remember.

"How do you know that—or why do you think it?"

"Because there must be—for you to see! I shouldn't have expected it."

"Then you take me for a damned fool?" laughed wonderful Newton Winch.

VI

could say nothing that, whether as to the sense of it or as to the way of it, didn't so enrich Mark's