Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/294

Rh So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other’s hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of renewing their own purposes.

XVIII

F Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed up in the convenient “I told you so,” he would have loosed the phrase on Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the Lynbrook house-party.

Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room, but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers. When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope could yield himself securely to the joys of conﬁdential discourse, he paused on the brink of disclosure to say: “It’s as well I saved that Ming from the ruins.”

“What ruins?” she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full beneﬁt of the effect he was seeking to produce.

He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a cigarette. “Truscomb is down and out—resigned, ‘the wise it call.’ And the alterations [ 278 ]