Page:The Relentless City.djvu/159

Rh he said.

She held up her hand.

she said.

Bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished.

he said.

Her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. He wished to know whether Dorothy had told her.

he said;

Sybil frowned.

she said.

said Bilton.

Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this