Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/181

Rh fender, but Barton Reeve and Miss Hamer were on their feet as if to declare that they were fixed.

'You're dining all alone?' he said to the girl.

'Women never dine alone,' she laughed. 'When they're alone they don't dine.'

Mrs. Gorton looked at her with an expression of which Reeve became aware: she was so handsome that, but for its marked gravity, it might have represented the pleasure and pride of sisterhood. But just when he most felt such complacency to be natural his hostess rather sharply mystified him. She won't be alone—more's the pity!' Mrs. Gorton spoke with more intention than he could seize, and the next moment he was opening the door for her.

'I shall have a cup of coffee and a biscuit—and also, propped up before me, Gardiner's Civil War. Don't you always read when you dine alone?' Miss Hamer asked as he came back.

Women were strange—he was not to be drawn in that direction. She had been showing him for an hour that she knew what he wanted; yet now that he had got his chance—which she moreover had given him—she looked as innocent as the pink face in the oval frame above the chimney. It took him, however, but a moment to see more: her innocence was her answer to the charge with which her sister had retreated, a charge into which, the next minute, her conscious blankness itself helped him to read a sense. Margaret Hamer was never alone, because Phil Mackern was always—But it was none of his business! She lingered there on the rug, and it somehow passed between them before anything else was done that he quite recognised that. After the point was thus settled he took his own affair straight up. 'You know why I'm here. It's because I believe you can help me.'

'Men always think that. They think every one can "help" them but themselves.'

'And what do women think?' Barton Reeve asked with some asperity. 'It might be a little of a light for me if you