Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/189

Rh Hamer had done; she only walked straight off again, shaking everything away as Mackern overtook her. 'Leave her alone—leave her alone!'

He held his tongue for some minutes, but he swished the air with his stick in a way that made her presently look at him. She found him positively pale, and he looked away from her. 'You should have given me that advice,' he remarked with dry derision, 'a good many weeks ago!'

'Well, it's never too late to mend!' she retorted with some vivacity.

'I beg your pardon. It's often too late—altogether too late. And as for "mending,"' Mackern went on almost sternly, 'you know as well as I that if I had—in time, or anything of that sort—tried to back out or pull up, you would have been the first to make her out an injured innocent and declare I had shamefully used her.'

This proposition took, as appeared, an instant or two to penetrate Mrs. Despard's consciousness; but when it had fairly done so it produced, like a train of gunpowder, an audible report. 'Why, you strange, rude man!'—she fairly laughed for indignation. 'Permit me not to answer you: I can't discuss any subject with you in that key.'

They had reached a neat white gate and paused for Mackern to open it; but, with his hand on the top, he only held it a little, fixing his companion with insistence and seemingly in full indifference to her protest. 'Upon my soul, the way women treat men!'

'Well?' she demanded, while he gasped as if it were more than he could express.

'It's too execrable! There's only one thing for her to do.' He clearly wished to show he was not to be humbugged.

'And what wonderful thing is that?'

'There's only one thing for any woman to do,' he pursued with an air of conscious distinctness, 'when she has drawn a man on to believe there's nothing she's not ready for.'