Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/313

Rh and brown and yellow leaves that, taking a short cut across Kensington Gardens, I came, among the untrodden ways, upon a couple occupying chairs under a tree, who immediately rose at the sight of me. I had been behind them at recognition, the fact that Marmaduke was in deep mourning having perhaps, so far as I had observed it, misled me. In my desire both not to look flustered at meeting them and to spare their own confusion I bade them again be seated and asked leave, as a third chair was at hand, to share a little their rest. Thus it befell that after a minute Lavinia and I had sat down, while our friend, who had looked at his watch, stood before us among the fallen foliage and remarked that he was sorry to have to leave us. Lavinia said nothing, but I expressed regret; I couldn't, however, as it struck me, without a false or a vulgar note speak as if I had interrupted a tender passage or separated a pair of lovers. But I could look him up and down, take in his deep mourning. He had not made, for going off, any other pretext than that his time was up and that he was due at home. 'Home,' with him now, had but one meaning: I knew him to be completely quartered in Westbourne Terrace. 'I hope nothing has happened,' I said—'that you've lost no one whom I know.'

Marmaduke looked at my companion, and she looked at Marmaduke. 'He has lost his wife,' she then observed.

Oh, this time, I fear, I had a small quaver of brutality; but it was at him I directed it. 'Your wife? I didn't know you had had a wife!'

'Well,' he replied, positively gay in his black suit, his black gloves, his high hatband, 'the more we live in the past, the more things we find in it. That's a literal fact. You would see the truth of it if your life had taken such a turn.'

'I live in the past,' Lavinia put in gently and as if to help us both.

'But with the result, my dear,' I returned, 'of not making,