Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/204

196 But she retreated straight before him, checking him with a gesture of horror, her first outbreak of emotion. 'Don't touch me!' He turned, after a minute, away; then, like a man dazed, looked, without sight, about for something. It proved to be his hat, which he presently went and took up. 'Don't talk, don't talk—you're not in it! she continued. 'You speak of "paying," but it's I who pay.' He reached the door and, having opened it, stood with his hand on the knob and his eyes on her face. She was far away, at the most distant of the windows. 'I shall never care for any one again,' she kept on.

Reeve had dropped to something deeper than resentment; more abysmal, even, it seemed to him, than renouncement or despair. But all he did was slowly to shake his helpless head at her. 'I've no words for you.'

'It doesn't matter. Don't think of me.'

He was closing the door behind him, but, still hearing her voice, kept it an instant. 'I'm all right!'—that was the last that came to him as he drew the door to.

 VII

' speak of the given case,' Philip Mackern said; 'that's the only thing I have to do with, and on what I've expressed to you of the situation it has made for me I don't yield an inch.'

Mrs. Gorton, to whom, in her own house, he had thus, in defence, addressed himself, was in a flood of tears which rolled, however, in their current not a few hard grains of asperity. 'You're always speaking of it, and it acts on my nerves, and I don't know what you mean by it, and I don't care, and I think you're horrible. The case is like any other case that can be mended if people will behave decently.'

Philip Mackern moved slowly about the room; impatience and suspense were in every step he took, but he evidently had