Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/28

 "'Many more'!"—he laughed out. "Charming," he scoffed without seeing where he went, "charming the way you appear to imagine one throws such things off! The idea people have of 'books'!" He had gone too far before he saw it—had gone so far that the next instant, at the sight of something in her face, there was nothing but to pull up. She really cared, and he had been calling her 'people,' had been grotesquely tilting before her at a shapeless object stuck up by himself, and stuck up crooked. She really cared, yes; yet what was it withal she cared for? He took a different tone in a moment to ask her, and in another she had begun in her own way to tell him.

"I've had in my mind—in connection with my ever marrying again—a condition; but it's a matter I meant to speak of only when driven to the wall, as I'm bound to say I think you've driven me." With which she went on as if it explained everything. "I've come home, you know, to stay."

For Ralph it explained too little; yet as there was something in her look that amplified it he saw more or less what was coming and he smiled without pleasure. "You said that—don't you remember?—the last time."

"Yes, I said it the last time, and you've every right to laugh at it and to doubt it. No one but myself can know that I'm serious, or why, and I can't give my reasons and I dare say I must accept 14