Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/304

296 It was incongruous in such a career, but he was rather more of a man. There came back to me with a shade of regret after I had got on this occasion into my train, which was not theirs, a memory of some words that, a couple of years before, I had uttered to poor Lavinia. She had said to me, speaking in reference to what was then our frequent topic and on some fresh evidence that I have forgotten: 'He feels now, you know, about Maud-Evelyn quite as the old people themselves do.'

'Well,' I had replied, 'it's only a pity he's paid for it!'

'Paid?' She had looked very blank.

'By all the luxuries and conveniences,' I had explained, 'that he comes in for through living with them. For that's what he practically does.'

At present I saw how wrong I had been. He was paid, but paid differently, and the mastered wonder of that was really what had been between us in the waiting-room of the station. Step by step, after this, I followed.

 VI

see Lavinia, for instance, in her ugly new mourning immediately after her mother's death. There had been long anxieties connected with this event, and she was already faded, already almost old. But Marmaduke, on her bereavement, had been to her, and she came straightway to me.

'Do you know what he thinks now?' she soon began. 'He thinks he knew her.'

'Knew the child?' It came to me as if I had half expected it.

'He speaks of her now as if she hadn't been a child.' My visitor gave me the strangest fixed smile. 'It appears that she wasn't so young—it appears she had grown up.'

I stared. 'How can it "appear"? They know, at least! There were the facts.' 