Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/195

Rh 'I haven't time, at all, now,' Mrs. Despard replied very sweetly. 'I can only give you two minutes—my dressmaker's waiting. But it isn't bad,' she added.

'Then it's good?' he eagerly asked.

'Oh, I haven't the least idea you'll think it so! But it's because it's exactly what I myself have been wanting and hoping that I wrote to you. It strikes me that the sooner you know the better. I've just heard from Bombay—from Amy Warden.'

'Amy Warden?' Philip Mackern wondered.

'John Grove-Stewart's sister—the nice one. He comes home immediately—doesn't wait till the autumn. So there you are!' said Mrs. Despard.

Philip Mackern looked straight at the news, with which she now presented herself as brilliantly illuminated. 'I don't see that I'm anywhere but where I've always been. I haven't expected anything of his absence that I shan't expect of his presence.'

Mrs. Despard thought a moment, but with perfect serenity. 'Have you expected quite fatally to compromise her?'

He gave her question an equal consideration. 'To compromise her?'

'That's what you are doing, you know—as deliberately as ever you can.'

Again the young man thought. They were in the middle of the room—she had not asked him to sit down. 'Quite fatally, you say?'

'Well, she has just one chance to save herself.'

Mackern, whom Mrs. Despard had already, more than once, seen turn pale under the emotion of which she could touch the spring, gave her again—and with it a smile that struck her as strange—this sign of sensibility. 'Yes—she may have only one chance. But it's such a good one!' he laughed. 'What is Mr. Grove-Stewart coming home for?'

'Because it has reached him that the whole place is filled