Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/136

128 He had slowly got up—now less actively but not less intensely nervous—and stood there heedless of this and rather differently looking at her. 'He never talks with you of his asking?'

'Never,' she repeated.

'And you still stick to it that I wouldn't?'

She hesitated. 'Have talked of it?'

'Have asked.'

She was beautiful as she smiled up at him. 'It would have been a little different. You would have talked.'

He remained there a little in silence; what he might have done seemed so both to separate them and to hold them together. 'And Chilver, you feel, will now never ask?'

'Never now.'

He seemed to linger for conviction. 'If he was going to, you mean, he would have done it'

'Yes'—she was prompt—'the moment his time was up.'

'I see'—and, turning away, he moved slowly about. 'So you're safe?'

'Safe.'

'And I'm just where I was!' he oddly threw off.

'I'm amazed again,' Mrs. Chilver said, 'at your so clinging to it that you would have had the benefit of his information.'

It was a remark that pulled him up as if something like a finer embarrassment had now come to him. 'I've only in mind his information as to the fact that he had made you speak.'

'And what good would that have done you?'

'Without the details?'—he was indeed thinking.

'I like your expressions!' said Mrs. Chilver.

'Yes—aren't they hideous?' He had jerked out his glass and, with a returning flush, appeared to affect to smile over it. But the drop of his glass showed something in each of his eyes that, though it might have come from the rage, came evidently—to his companion's vision at least—from the more pardonable pain, of his uncertainty. 'But there we are!'