Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/132

124 alone. It took him then but ten minutes—ten minutes of a marked but subsiding want of ease—to break out with a strong appeal to her on the question of the danger of the possible arrival of somebody else. 'Would you mind—of course I know it's an immense deal for me to ask—having it just said at the door that you're not at home? I do so want really to get at you.'

'Oh, you needn't be afraid of an interruption.' Mrs. Chilver seemed only amused. 'No one comes to us. You see what our life is. Whom have you yet met here?'

He appeared struck with this. 'Yes. Of course your living at Hammersmith'

'We have to live where we can live for tenpence a year.' He was silent at this touch, with a silence that, like an exclamation, betrayed a kind of helplessness, and she went on explaining as if positively to assist him. 'Besides, we haven't the want. And so few people know us. We're our own com pany.'

'Yes—that's just it. I never saw such a pair. It's as if you did it on purpose. But it was to show you how I feel at last the luxury of seeing you without Chilver.'

'Ah, but I can't forbid him the door!' she laughed.

He kept his eyes for a minute on that of the room. 'Do you mean he will come in?'

'Oh, if he does it won't be to hurt you. He's not jealous.'

'Well, I am,' said the visitor, frankly, 'and I verily believe it's his not being—and showing it so—that partly has to do with that. If he cared I believe I shouldn't. Besides, what does it matter?' He threshed about in his place uncomfortably.

She sat there—with all her effaced anxieties—patient and pretty. 'What does what matter?'

'Why, how it happens—since it does happen—that he's always here.'

'But you see he isn't!'