Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/323

 "I'm quite all right."

"No," she said. "I don't know what has happened; but somesing has changed very much." She spoke with a sorrowful conviction that proved itself well-founded in the utterance of a single word. Upon the "Duumvir" and in Algiers, and, indeed, until the ascent of the Djurdjurra, he had thought her most irresistible of all whenever she said "somesing"; and once he had spoken of this to her, telling her he found the word, on her lips, "adorable." But when she said it now, his emotional experience took the form of a wish that she might be content to say nothing at all.

"I should never have come with you. I should" Her voice trembled, and then suddenly she sank back against the cushions, her hand pressed upon her forehead in an impulsive gesture of pain. "Ah! I should have known it!"

"You should have known what?"

"That you might come to look upon me and poor Hyacinthe as an imposition upon you." She drew in her breath sharply, then straightened herself to her usual erectness. "It is one, too."

"An imposition? No, indeed!" he protested with some apparent warmth. "You mustn't say such things."