Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/166

THE IVORY TOWER tact they had mastered for intercourse such perfect reciprocities of address. You would certainly have concluded to their entire confidence in these. "With a dozen people in the house it is luck," Horton had at once appreciatively said; but when their fellow-visitors had been handled between them for a minute or so only to collapse again like aproned puppets on removal of pressure from the squeak, he had jumped to the question of Gray Fielder and to frank interest in Cissy's news of him. This news, the death of Mr. Betterman that morning, quite sufficiently explained her inability to produce the more direct impression; that worthy's nephew and heir, in close and more and more quickened attendance on him during the previous days, had been seen as yet, to the best of her belief, by no one at all but dear Davey—not counting of course Rosanna Gaw, of the fact of whose own bereavement as well Horton was naturally in possession, and who had made it possible, she understood, for their friend to call on Graham.

"Oh Davey has called on Graham?" Horton was concerned to ask while they sat together on a rude worn slab. "What then, if he has told you, was his particular idea?"

"Won't his particular idea," Cissy returned, "be exactly the one he won't have told me? What he did speak to me of yesterday morning, and what I told him I thought would be beautiful 152