Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/296

288 'Yes—perhaps even tried to forget her. But the Dedricks can't.'

I wondered what she had done: had it been anything very bad? However, it was none of my business, and I only said: 'They communicate with her?'

'Oh, all the while,'

'Then why isn't she with them?'

Marmaduke thought. 'She is—now.'

'"Now"? Since when?'

'Well, this last year.'

'Then why do you say they've lost her?'

'Ah,' he said, smiling sadly, 'I should call it that. I, at any rate,' he went on, 'don't see her.'

Still more I wondered. 'They keep her apart?'

He thought again. 'No, it's not that. As I say, they live for her.'

'But they don't want you to—is that it?'

At this he looked at me for the first time, as I thought, a little strangely. 'How can I?'

He put it to me as if it were bad of him, somehow, that he shouldn't; but I made, to the best of my ability, a quick end of that. 'You can't. Why in the world should you? Live for my girl. Live for Lavinia.'

 IV

unfortunately run the risk of boring him again with that idea, and, though he had not repudiated it at the time, I felt in my having returned to it the reason why he never reappeared for weeks. I saw 'my girl,' as I had called her, in the interval, but we avoided with much intensity the subject of Marmaduke. It was just this that gave me my perspective for finding her constantly full of him. It determined me, in all the circumstances, not to rectify her mistake about the childlessness of the Dedricks. But whatever I left unsaid, her