Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/171

Rh "'Feels' it, my dear sir?" the Doctor cried. "She has been made so pitifully ill by it that there's no saying just what turn her condition may take, and she now calls for so much of my attention as to force me to plead, with you, that excuse for my brevity. Mrs. Beever," he rapidly pursued, "requests you to regard this hurried inquiry as the sequel to what you were so good as to say to her."

Dennis thought a moment; his face had changed as if by the action of Rose's disappearance and the instinctive revival, in a different relation, of the long, stiff habit of business, the art of treating affairs and meeting men. This was the art of not being surprised, and, with his emotion now controlled, he was discernibly on his guard. "I'm afraid," he replied, "that what I said to Mrs. Beever was a very small matter."

"She doesn't think it at all a small matter to have said you'd help her. You can do so—in the cruel demands our catastrophe makes of her—by considering that I represent her. It's in her name, therefore, that I ask you if you're engaged to be married to Miss Armiger."