Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/251

Rh way to meet the strain." She paused; Hugh waited for something further, and "I gave him my word I wouldn't help you," she wound up.

He turned it over. "To act in the matter—I see."

"To act in the matter"—she went through with it—"after the high stand I had taken."

Still he studied it. "I see—I see. It's between you and your father."

"It's between him and me—yes. An engagement not again to trouble him."

Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. "Ah, that was nice of you. And natural. That's all right!"

"No"—she spoke from a deeper depth—"it's altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it."

"Well, say you must"—he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a "lark"—"if we can at least go on talking."

"Ah, we can at least go on talking!" she perversely sighed. "I can say anything I like so long as I don't say it to him!" she almost