Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/184

170 something hard and dry in the way he stood there, something so opposed to his usual fine overflow that for a minute Dennis could only show by pitying silence the full sense of his wretchedness. He was in the presence of a passionate perversity—an attitude in which the whole man had already petrified. "Will it perhaps help you to think of something," he presently said, "if I tell you that your disaster is almost as much mine as yours, and that what's of aid to one of us may perhaps therefore be of aid to the other?"

"It's very good of you," Tony replied, "to be willing to take upon you the smallest corner of so big a burden. Don't do that—don't do that, Mr. Vidal," he repeated, with a heavy head-shake. "Don't come near such a thing; don't touch it; don't know it!" He straightened himself as if with a long, suppressed shudder; and then with a sharper and more sombre vehemence, "Stand from under it!" he exclaimed. Dennis, in deeper compassion, looked at him with an intensity that might have suggested submission, and Tony followed up what he apparently took for an advantage. "You came here for an hour, for your own reasons, for your