Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/236

224 which indeed, presently she made up her mind to. "Do you want to marry me?"

It had this time better success—if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. "No, Cornelia—not to marry you."

His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. "Not at least," she convulsively smiled, "until you've honourably tried Mrs Worthingham. Don't you really mean to?" she gallantly insisted.

He waited again a little; then he brought out: "I'll tell you presently." He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. "That table was old Twelfth-Street?"

"Everything here was."

"Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven't to wear a green shade." And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. "Didn't we talk of Mary Cardew?"

"Why, do you remember it?"—she marvelled to extravagance.

"You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with me." He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. "There are so many connections—there will be so