Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/71

Rh deal with her in our way. Not if he handles her in his own."

"And what, pray, is his own?"

Traffle, his hands in his pockets, resumed his walk, touching with the points of his shoes certain separations between the highly-polished planks of his floor. "Well, why should we have to know?"

"Do you mean we're to wash our hands of her?"

He only circulated at first,—but quite sounding a low whistle of exhilaration. He felt happier than for a long time; broken as at a blow was the formation of ice that had somehow covered all his days, the whole ground of life, what he would have called the things under. There they were, the things under! He could see them now; which was practically what he, after a little, replied. "It will be so interesting." He pulled up, none the less, as he turned, before her poor scared and mottled face, her still suffused eyes, her "dressed" head parading above these miseries.

She vaguely panted, as from a dance through bush and briar. " But what, Sidney, will be?"

"To see what becomes of her. Without our muddling." Which was a term, however, that she so protested against his use of, that he had on the spot, with more kindness than logic, to attenuate, admitting her right to ask him who could do less,—less than take the stand she proposed; though indeed coming back to the matter that evening after dinner, (they never really got away from it; but they had the consciousness now of false starts in other