Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/156

148 'but what is she to you, after all, and what is it to you that, as to anything whatever, she should or she shouldn't?'

Peter, who had turned red, hung fire a little. 'Well—it's all, simply, what I make of it.'

There was now, however, in his young friend, a strange, an adopted, insistence. 'What are you, after all, to her?'

'Oh, nothing. But that's another matter.'

'She cares only for my father,' said Lance the Parisian.

'Naturally—and that's just why.'

'Why you've wished to spare her?'

'Because she cares so tremendously much.'

Lance took a turn about the room, but with his eyes still on his host. 'How awfully—always—you must have liked her!'

'Awfully. Always,' said Peter Brench.

The young man continued for a moment to muse—then stopped again in front of him. 'Do you know how much she cares?' Their eyes met on it, but Peter, as if his own found something new in Lance's, appeared to hesitate, for the first time for so long, to say he did know. 'I've only just found out,' said Lance. 'She came to my room last night, after being present, in silence and only with her eyes on me, at what I had had to take from him; she came—and she was with me an extraordinary hour.'

He had paused again, and they had again for a while sounded each other. Then something—and it made him suddenly turn pale—came to Peter. 'She does know?'

'She does know. She let it all out to me—so as to demand of me no more than that, as she said, of which she herself had been capable. She has always, always known,' said Lance without pity.

Peter was silent a long time; during which his companion might have heard him gently breathe and, on touching him, might have felt within him the vibration of a long, low sound suppressed. By the time he spoke, at last, he had taken everything in. 'Then I do see how tremendously much.'