Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/134

126 this inquiry but silence, and as her face made her silence charming, his appeal suddenly changed. 'Do you mind my going on like this?'

'I don't mind anything. You want, I judge, some help. What help can I give you?'

He dropped, at this, straight into his chair again. 'There you are! You pitied me even from the first—regularly beforehand. You're so confoundedly superior'—he almost sufficiently joked. 'Of course I know all our relations are most extraordinary, but I think yours and mine is the strangest—unless it be yours and Chilver's.'

'Let us say it's his and yours, and have done with it,' she smiled.

'Do you know what I came back then for?—I mean the second time, this time?'

'Why, to see me, I've all these days supposed.'

'Well,' said Braddle with a slight hesitation, 'it was, to that extent, to show my confidence.'

But she also hesitated. 'Your confidence in what?'

He had still another impatience, with the force of which he again changed his place. 'Am I giving him away? How much do you know?'

In the air of his deep unrest her soft stillness—lending itself, but only by growing softer—had little by little taken on a beauty. 'I'm trying to follow you—to understand. I know of your meeting with Henry last year at a club.'

'Ah then, if he gave me away!'

'I gathered rather, I seem to remember, from what he men tioned to me, that he must rather have given me too. But I don't in the least mind.'

'Well, what passed between us then,' said Braddle, 'is why I came back. He made me, if I should wait, a sort of promise'

'Oh'—she took him up—'I don't think he was conscious of anything like a promise. He said at least nothing to me