Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/316

308 devoted the periods between, at home, altogether to visits among people, mainly relatives, to whom these friends of mine were not known. Lavinia of course wrote to me—wrote, among many things, that Marmaduke was ill and had not seemed at all himself since the loss of his 'family,' and this in spite of the circumstance, which she had already promptly communicated, that they had left him, by will, 'almost everything.' I knew before I came back to remain that she now saw him often and, to the extent of the change that had over taken his strength and his spirits, greatly ministered to him. As soon as we at last met I asked for news of him; to which she replied: 'He's gradually going.' Then on my surprise: 'He has had his life.'

'You mean that, as he said of Mrs. Dedrick, his sum of passion is spent?'

At this she turned away. 'You've never understood.'

I had, I conceived; and when I went subsequently to see him I was moreover sure. But I only said to Lavinia on this first occasion that I would immediately go; which was precisely what brought out the climax, as I feel it to be, of my story. 'He's not now, you know,' she turned round to admonish me, 'in Westbourne Terrace. He has taken a little old house in Kensington.'

'Then he hasn't kept the things?'

'He has kept everything.' She looked at me still more as if I had never understood.

'You mean he has moved them?'

She was patient with me. 'He has moved nothing. Everything is as it was, and kept with the same perfection.'

I wondered. 'But if he doesn't live there?'

'It's just what he does.'

'Then how can he be in Kensington?'

She hesitated, but she had still more than her old grasp of it. 'He's in Kensington—without living.'

'You mean that at the other place?'