Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/76

64 "Ah; that, my dear, is no answer! Can you assure me on your honour that you're conscious of anything you can call real affection for her?"

Jane blankly brooded. "What has that to do with it?"

"I think it has everything. If we don't feel a tenderness."

"You certainly strike me as feeling one!" Mrs Traffle sarcastically cried.

He weighed it, but to the effect of his protesting. "No; not enough for me to demand of her to marry to spare my sensibility."

His wife continued to gloom. "What is there in what she has done to make us tender?"

"Let us admit then, if there's nothing, that it has made us tough! Only then we must be tough. If we're having the strain and the pain of it, let us also have the relief and the fun."

"Oh, the 'fun'!" Jane wailed; but adding soon after: "If she'll marry him I'll forgive her."

"Ah; that's not enough!" he pronounced as they went to bed.

III

he was to feel too the length that even forgiving her would have to go—for Jane at least—when, a couple of days later, they both, from the drawing-room window, saw, to their liveliest astonishment, the girl alight at the gate. She had taken a fly from