Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/114

106 this moment interposing with, a 'Take your seats, please!' and sharply, on his entering the carriage, shutting the door on him, he continued the conversation from the window, on which he rested his elbows. During the movement his protest had changed to something else. 'Ah, but won't she yet?'

'Let me have it? I'm sure I don't know. All I can say is that nothing has come from her.'

'Then it's because there is nothing.'

'I hope so,' said Braddle from the platform.

'So you see,' Chilver called out as the train moved, 'I was right!' And he leaned forth as the distance grew and Braddle stood motionless and grave, gaily insisting and taking leave with his waving hand. But when he drew in his head and dropped into a seat he rather collapsed, tossing his hat across the compartment and sinking back into a corner and an attitude from which, staring before him and not even lighting another cigarette, he never budged till he reached Victoria.

A fortnight later the footfall of Mrs. Damerel's intended was loud on the old staircase in the Temple and the knob of his stick louder still on the old door. 'It's only that it has rather stuck in my crop,' he presently explained, 'that I let you leave Brighton the other day with the pretension that you had been "right," as you called it, about the risk—attending the particular step—that I took. I can't help it if I want you to know—for it bores me that you're so pleased—that you weren't in the least right. You were most uncommonly wrong.'

'Wrong?'

'Wrong.'

Chilver looked vaguely about as if suddenly in search of something, then moved with an odd general inconsequence to the window. 'As the day's so fine, do you mind our getting out of this beastly stuffy place into the Gardens? We can talk there.' His hat was apparently what he had been looking for, and he took it up, and with it some cigarettes. Braddle,