Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/330

322 His wondering eyes became strange. 'Just for that?'

'You may certainly say it isn't much—when people love as you do.'

'Ah, I'm afraid then Lily doesn't!'—and he turned away in his trouble.

She watched him while he moved, not speaking for a minute. 'My dear young man, are you afraid of your mamma?'

He faced short about again. 'I'm afraid of this—that if she does do it she won't forgive her. She will do it—yes. But Lily will be for her, in consequence, ever after, the person who has made her submit herself. She'll hate her for that—and then she'll hate me for being concerned in it.' The Prince presented it all with clearness—almost with charm. 'What do you say to that?'

His friend had to think. 'Well, only, I fear, that we belong, Lily and I, to a race unaccustomed to counting with such passions. Let her hate!' she, however, a trifle inconsistently wound up.

'But I love her so!'

'Which?' Lady Champer asked it almost ungraciously; in such a tone at any rate that, seated on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, his much-ringed hands nervously locked together and his eyes of distress wide open, he met her with visible surprise. What she met him with is perhaps best noted by the fact that after a minute of it his hands covered his bent face and she became aware she had drawn tears. This produced such regret in her that before they parted she did what she could to attenuate and explain—making a great point, at all events, of her rule, with Lily, of putting only his own side of the case. 'I insist awfully, you know, on your greatness!'

He jumped up, wincing. 'Oh, that's horrid.'

'I don't know. Whose fault is it, then, at any rate, if trying to help you may have that side?' This was a question that, with the tangle he had already to unwind, only added a