Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/125

Rh 'All the while you've been gone?'

'No, after a time I gave it up. I've been round the world—in extraordinary holes.'

'And have you come back to England,' Chilver asked, 'to stay awhile?'

'I don't know—I don't know!' his friend replied with some impatience.

They kept it up, but with pauses—pauses during which, as they listened, in the big, stale, empty room, always dreary in the absence of talk and the silence of the billiard-balls just beyond—the loud tick of the clock gave their position almost as much an air of awkward penance as if they had had lines to do or were staying after school. Chilver wondered if it would after all practically fail, his desire that they should remain friends. His wife—beautiful creature!—would give every help, so that it would really depend on Braddle himself. It might indeed have been as an issue to the ponderation of some such question on his own part that poor Bertram suddenly exclaimed: 'I see you're happy—I can make that out!'

He had said it in a way suggesting that it might make with him a difference for the worse, but Chilver answered none the less good-humouredly. 'I'm afraid I can't pretend that I'm in the least miserable. But is it impossible you should come and see us?—come and judge, as it were, for yourself?'

Braddle looked graver than ever. 'Would it suit your wife?'

'Oh, she's not afraid, I think!' his companion laughed. 'You spoke just now,' he after a moment continued, 'of something that in your absence, in your travels, you "gave up." Let me ask you frankly if you meant that you had undertaken inquiries'

'Yes; I "nosed round," as they say out there; I looked about and tried to pick something.' Braddle spoke on a drop of his interlocutor, checked evidently by a certain hardness of defiance in his good eyes; but he couldn't know that Chilver