Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/160

THE IVORY TOWER "And what in the world do you call that?"

"Why, that you are more out of it all, out of the air he has breathed all his life and that in these last years has more and more sickened him, than anyone else in the least belonging to him, that he could possibly put his hand on."

He stood before her with his hands in his pockets—he could study her now quite as she had studied himself. "The extent, Rosanna, to which you must have answered for me!"

She met his scrutiny from between more narrowed lids. "I did put it all to him—I spoke for you as earnestly as one can ever speak for another. But you're not to gather from it," she thus a trifle awkwardly smiled, "that I have let you in for twenty millions, or for anything approaching. He will have left you, by my conviction, all he has; but he has nothing at all like that. That's all I'm sure of—of no details whatever. Even my father doesn't know," she added; "in spite of its having been for a long time the thing he has most wanted to, most sat here, these weeks, on some chance of his learning. The truth, I mean, of Mr. Betterman's affairs."

Gray felt a degree of relief at the restrictive note on his expectations which might fairly have been taken, by its signs, for a betrayed joy in their extent. The air had really, under Rosanna's touch, darkened itself with numbers; but what she had just admitted was a rift of light. In this 146