Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/195

THE IVORY TOWER in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers, sisters of charity or suchlike, surrounding the grand affair and counting their beads."

Davey's rich patience had a shrug. "The grand affair, my dear child, is their affair, over there, and not mine; though when you indulge in such fancies 'for him', I can't but wonder who it is you mean."

"Who it is?" She mightn't have understood his difficulty.

"Why the dead man or the living!"

They had gone on again; Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared; and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid, only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."

"To like?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"

"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form."

He had nothing but derision for her here. "It didn't occur to me at all to associate him with the idea of poverty."

"The place must all the same be hideous," she said, "and the conditions mean—for him to prowl 181