Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/214

206 under the charm—she has succumbed. How else can he have dragged her here in her state?' I wondered much, and indeed her state seemed happy enough, though somehow, at the same time, the pair struck me as not in the least matching. It was only for half a minute that my friend made them do so by going on: 'It's perfectly evident. She's not a daughter, I should have told you, by the way—she's only a sister. They've struck up an intimacy in the glow of his having engaged to publish from month to month the wonderful book that, as I understand you, her brother has left behind.'

That was plausible, but it didn't bear another look. 'Never!' I at last returned. 'Daughter or sister, that fellow won't touch him.'

'Why in the world?'

'Well, for the same reason that, as you'll see, he won't touch me. It's wretched, but we're too good for him.' My explanation did as well as another, though it had the drawback of leaving me to find another for Miss Delavoy's enslavement. I was not to find it that evening, for as poor Windon's play went on we had other problems to meet, and at the end our objects of interest were lost to sight in the general blinding blizzard. The affair was a bitter 'frost,' and if we were all in our places to the last everything else had disappeared. When I got home it was to be met by a note from Mr. Beston accepting my article almost with enthusiasm, and it is a proof of the rapidity of my fond revulsion that before I went to sleep, which was not till ever so late, I had excitedly embraced the prospect of letting him have, on the occasion of Delavoy's new thing, my peculiar view of the great man. I must add that I was not a little ashamed to feel I had made a fortune the very night Windon had lost one.

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really proved, in the event, most kind, though his appeal, which promised to become frequent, was for two or