Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/208

200 not, on one side or the other, taking that up. There was a strangeness as well, he was perfectly aware, in his finding himself surprised and even, for ten seconds, as it happened, mercilessly disappointed, at her not looking quite so 'badly' as her encounter with a grave crisis might have been entitled to present her. She looked beautiful, perversely beautiful: he couldn't indeed have said just how directly his presumption of visible ravage was to have treated her handsome head. Meanwhile, as she carried this handsome head—in a manner he had never quite seen her carry it before—to the window and stood looking blindly out, there deepened in him almost to quick anguish the fear even of breathing upon the hour they had reached. That she had come back to him, to whatever end, was somehow in itself so divine a thing that lips and hands were gross to deal with it. What, moreover, in the extremity of a man's want, had he not already said? They were simply shut up there with their moment, and he, at least, felt it throb and throb in the hush.

At last she turned round. 'He will never, never understand that I can have been so base.'

Mackern awkwardly demurred. 'Base?'

'Letting you, from the first, make, to me, such a difference.'

'I don't think you could help it.' He was still awkward.

'How can he believe that? How can he admit it?'

She asked it too wofully to expect a reply, but the young man thought a moment. 'You can't look to me to speak for him'—he said it as feeling his way and without a smile. 'He should have looked out for himself.'

'He trusted me. He trusted me,' she repeated.

'So did I—so did I.'

'Yes. Yes.' She looked straight at him, as if tasting all her bitterness. 'But I pity him so that it kills me!'

'And only him?'—and Philip Mackern came nearer. 'It's perfectly simple,' he went on. 'I'll abide by that measure. It shall be the one you pity most.'