Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/211

Rh good to happen to him. If you like him," he hastened laughingly to add, "of course it does happen—I see!"

He attenuated his meaning, but he had already exposed it, and he could perceive that Rose, with a kind of tragic perversity, was determined to get the full benefit, whatever it might be, of her impression or her grievance. She quickly did her best to look collected. "You think he's safe then, and solid, and not so stupid as he strikes one at first?"

"Stupid?—not a bit. He's a statue in the block—he's a sort of slumbering giant. The right sort of tact will call him to life, the right sort of hand will work him out of the stone."

"And it escaped you just now, in a moment of unusual expansion, that the right sort are mine?"

Tony puffed away at his cigarette, smiling at her resolutely through its light smoke. "You do injustice to my attitude about you. There isn't an hour of the day that I don't indulge in some tribute or other to your great ability."

Again there came into the girl's face her strange alternative look—the look of being made by her