Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/259

Rh address. This missive simply informed him that Mr. Carteret wished to see him, and it seemed to imply that he was better, though Chayter wouldn't say so. Nick again took his place in the train to Beauclere. He had been there very often, but it was present to him that now, after a little, he should go only once more, for a particular dismal occasion. All that was over—everything that belonged to it was over. He learned on his arrival—he saw Mrs. Lendon immediately—that his old friend had continued to pick up. He had expressed a strong and a perfectly rational desire to talk with Nick, and the doctor had said that if it was about anything important it was much better not to oppose him. "He says it's about something very important," Mrs. Lendon remarked, resting shy eyes on him while she added that she was looking after her brother for the hour. She had sent those wonderful young ladies out to see the abbey. Nick paused with her outside of Mr. Carteret's door. He wanted to say something comfortable to her in return for her homely charity—give her a hint, which she was far from looking for, that practically he had now no interest in her brother's estate. This was impossible of course. Her absence of irony gave him no pretext, and such an allusion would be an insult to her simple discretion. She was either not thinking of his interest at all, or she was thinking of it with the tolerance of a mind trained to a hundred decent submissions. Nick looked for an instant into her mild, uninvestigating eyes, and it came over him supremely that the goodness of these people was singularly pure: they were a part of what was cleanest and sanest and dullest in humanity. There had been just a little mocking