Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/199

Rh Despard broke out. 'Do you mean you're not going to keep faith?'

'What faith do you call faith?'

'You know perfectly what I call faith for you, and in how little doubt, from the first, I've left you about it!'

This reply had been sharp enough to jerk the speaker for a moment, as by the toss of her head, out of her woe, but Margaret met it at first only by showing her again a face that enjoined patience and pity. They continued to look indeed, each out of her peculiar distress, more things than they found words for. 'I don't know,' Margaret Hamer finally said. 'I have time—I've a little; I've more than you—that's what makes me so sorry for you. I've been very possibly the direst idiot—I'll admit anything you like; though I won't pretend I see now how it could have been different. It couldn't—it couldn't. I don't know, I don't know,' she wearily, mechanically repeated. There was something in her that had surrendered by this time all the importance of her personal question; she wished to keep it back or to get rid of it. 'Don't, at any rate, think one is selfish and all taken up. I'm perfectly quiet—it's only about you I'm nervous. You're worse than I, dear,' she added with a dim smile.

But Mrs. Despard took it more than gravely. 'Worse?'

'I mean you've more to think of. And perhaps even he's worse.'

Mrs. Despard thought again. 'He's terrible.'

Her companion hesitated—she had perhaps mistaken the allusion. 'I don't mean your husband.'

Mrs. Despard had mistaken the allusion, but she carried it off. 'Barton Reeve is terrible. It's more than I deserve.'

'Well, he really cares. There it is.'

'Yes, there it is!' Mrs. Despard echoed. 'And much that helps me!'

They hovered about, but shifting their relation now and