Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/79

Rh for her hint that they might have forgotten how pretty she could be; and he further made sure she would incur neither pains nor costs for any new attempt on them. The Mora they had always taken her for would serve her perfectly still; that young woman was bad enough, in all conscience, to hang together through anything that might yet happen.

So much he was to feel she had conveyed, and that it was the little person presenting herself, at her convenience, on these terms who had been all the while, in their past, their portentous inmate,—since what had the portent been, by the same token, but exactly of this? By the end of three minutes more our friend's sole thought was to conceal from her that he had looked for some vulgar sign,—such as, reported to Wimbledon tea-tables, could be confidentially mumbled about; he was almost as ashamed of that elderly innocence as if she had caught him in the fact of disappointment at it. Meanwhile she had expressed her errand very simply and serenely. "I've come to see you because I don't want to lose sight of you,—my being no longer with you is no reason for that." She was going to ignore, he saw,—and she would put it through; she was going to ignore everything that suited her, and the quantity might become prodigious. Thus it would rest upon them, poor things, to disallow, if they must, the grace of these negatives,—in which process she would watch them flounder without help. It opened out before him,—a vertiginous view of a gulf; the abyss of what