Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/295

Rh "An appearance—?" Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know which one.

"How shouldn't I have supposed you really to care for Bill Frankle?—as, thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn't marry me. I was only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn't happened; and perhaps," he added the next instant, with something of a conscious lapse from the finer style, "hadn't been in question."

She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window again, and then she answered, but without passion, unless it was that of her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, "Oh, the blind, the pitiful folly!"—to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on. "Put it then that there wasn't much to do between your finding that you loathed me for another woman, or discovering only, when it came to the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself."

Which, offered him in that immensely effective fashion, he recognized that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly—not so very!—take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it wasn't to perjure himself with any pretence