Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/194

THE IVORY TOWER his back turned, seeming at the same moment, and whether or no her inquiry reached his ear, struck with something that had pulled him up as well and that made him stand and look down in thought. "Why, I suppose the nephew must be himself a sort of watcher," Davey found himself not other than decently vague to suggest.

But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the point had really concerned her. She appeared indeed to question the more, though her eyes were on Haughty's rather brooding back while she did so. "Then if he does stay in the room, when he comes out of it to see people?"

Her very drop seemed to present the state of things to which the poor deceased was in that case left; for which, however, her good host declined to be responsible. "I don't suppose he comes out for so many."

"He came out at any rate for you." The sense of it all rather remarkably held her, and it might have been some communication of this that, overtaking Horton at his slight distance, determined in him the impulse to leave them, without more words, and walk by himself to the house. "We don't surround such occasions with any form or state of imagination—scarcely with any decency, do we?" Cissy adventured while observing Haughty's retreat. "I should like to think for him of a catafalque and great draped hangings—I should like to think for him of tall flambeaux 180