Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/39

THE IVORY TOWER She'll tell you all about it, she'll clothe it in every grace. Only I assure you I myself am as much interested as anyone," he added—"interested, I mean, in the question of whether the old man there has really brought him out at the last gasp this way to do some decent thing about him. An impression prevails," he further explained, "that you're in some wonderful way in the old wretch's confidence, and I therefore make no bones of telling you that your arrival on our scene there, since you're so good as to consent to come, has created an impatience beyond even what your appearances naturally everywhere create. I give you warning that there's no limit to what we want to know."

Rosanna took this in now as she so often took things—working it down in silence at first: it shared in the general weight of all direct contributions to her consciousness. It might then, when she spoke, have sunk deep. She looked about again, in her way, as if under her constant oppression, and seeing, a little off from their gravelled walk, a public bench to which a possible path branched down, she said, on a visibly grave decision: "Look here, I want to talk to you—you're one of the few people in all your crowd to whom I really can. So come and sit down."

Davey Bradham, arrested before her, had an air for his responsibilities that quite matched her own. "Then what becomes of them all there?" 25