Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/98

90 doubtless took something from the straightness of their further mute communication. This interval, the next minute, as Chilver failed to return, Braddle diminished by gaining the door in company with a porter whose arm he had seized on the way. 'Take this gentleman's things off the cab and put on mine.' Then as he turned to his friend: 'Go and tell the young woman there that you'll have the room I've given up.'

Chilver laid upon him a hand still interrogative enough not to be too grateful. 'Are you very sure it's all right?'

Braddle's face simply followed for a moment, in the outer lamplight, the progress of the operation he had decreed. 'Do you think I'm going to allow you to make out that I'm afraid?'

'Well, my dear chap, why shouldn't you be?' Henry Chilver, with this retort, did nothing; he only, with his hands in his pockets, let the porter and the cabman bestir themselves. 'I simply wanted to be civil.'

'Oh, I'll risk it!' said the younger man with a free enough laugh. 'Be awfully attentive, you know.'

'Of course it won't be anything like the same thing to her,' Chilver went on.

'Of course not, but explain. Tell her I'm wiring, writing. Do everything, in short. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye, good-bye, old man.' And Chilver went down with him to the rearranged cab. 'So many thanks.'

'Thanks?' said the other as he got in.

'I mean because I'm—hang it!—just tired enough to be glad to go to bed.'

'Oh!' came rather drily from Braddle out of the window of the cab.

'Shan't I go with you to the station?' his companion asked.

'Dear no—much obliged!'

'Well, you shall have my report!' Chilver continued.

'Ah, I shall have Mrs. Damerel's!' Braddle answered as the cab drove away.