Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/193

Rh it on his tongue's end to reply. But he stopped himself in time, and felt extraordinarily delicate and discreet. 'I don't say it's the easiest one in the world; but here I stand, after all—and I'm not supposed to be such an ass—ready to give her every conceivable assistance.' His friend, at this, replied nothing; but he presently spoke again. 'What has she invented, at Pickenham, to-day, but to keep me from coming?'

'Is Kate to-day at Pickenham?' Miss Hamer inquired.

Barton Reeve, in his acuteness, caught something in the question—an energy of profession of ignorance—in which he again saw depths. It presented Pickenham and whomsoever might be there as such a blank that he felt quite forced to say:

'I rather imagined—till I spied you just now—that you would have gone.'

'Well, you see I haven't.' With which our young lady paused again, turning on him more frankly. It struck him that, as from a conscious effort, she had a heightened colour. 'You must know far better than I what she feels, but I repeat it to you, once for all, as, the last time I saw her, she gave it me. I said just now she hadn't explained, but she did explain that.' The girl just faltered, but she brought it out. 'She can't divorce. And if she can't, you know, she can't!'

'I never heard such twaddle,' Barton Reeve declared. 'As if a woman with a husband who hates her so he would like to kill her couldn't obtain any freedom!' And he gave such a passionate whirl of his stick that it flew straight away from him.

His companion waited till he had picked it up. 'Ah, but there's freedom and freedom.'

'She can do anything on all the wide earth she likes.' He had gone on as if not hearing her, and, lost in the vastness of his meaning, he absolutely glared awhile at the distance. 'But she's afraid!'

Miss Hamer, in her turn, stared at the way he sounded it; then she gave a vague laugh. 'How you say that!'