Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/207

Rh about, and then have the assurance to come and prate to us of "honour"!'

Mackern turned away again—again he measured his cage. 'What is there I'm not ready to make good?'—and he gave, as he passed, a hard, anxious smile.

Mrs. Gorton said nothing for a moment; then she spoke with an accumulation of dignity. 'I think you both—if you want to know—absolutely improper persons, and if I had had my wits about me I would have declined, in time, to lend my house again to any traffic that might take place between you. But you're hatefully here, to my shame, and the wretched creature, whom I myself got off, has come up, and the fat's cn [sic] the fire, and it's too late to prevent it. It's not too late, however, just to say this: that if you've come, and if you intend, to bully and browbeat her'

'Well?' Philip Mackern asked.

She had faltered and paused, and the next moment he saw why. The door had opened without his hearing it—Margaret Hamer stood and looked at them. He made no movement; he only, after a minute, held her eyes long enough to fortify him, as it were, in his attempted intensity of stillness. He felt already as if some process, something complex and exquisite, were going on that a sound, that a gesture, might spoil. But his challenge to Mrs. Gorton was still in the air, and she apparently, on her vision of her sister, had seen something pass. She fixed the girl and she fixed Mackern; then, highly flushed and moving to the door, she answered him. 'Why, you're a brute and a coward!' With which she banged the door behind her.

The way the others met without speech or touch was extraordinary, and still more singular perhaps the things that, in their silence, Philip Mackern thought. There was no freedom of appeal for him—he instantly felt that; there was neither burden nor need. He wondered Margaret didn't notice in some way what Mrs. Gorton had said; there was a strangeness in her