Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/167

164 have handled stock and turned this and that about, and now I can offer my wife a very pretty fortune. It has been going on very quietly; people don't know it; but Nora, if she cares to, shall show them!" Mrs. Keith colored and mused; she was lost in a tardy afterthought.

"It seems odd to be talking to you this way," Roger went on, exhilarated by this summing-up of his career. "Do you remember that letter of mine from P?"

"I did not tear it up in a rage," she answered. "I came across it the other day."

"It was rather odd, my writing it, you know," Roger confessed. "But in my sudden desire to register a vow, I needed a friend. I turned to you as my best friend." Mrs. Keith acknowledged the honor with a toss of her head. Had she made a mistake of old? She very soon decided that Nora should not repeat it. Her hand-shake, as she left her friend, was generous; it seemed to assure him that he might count upon her.

When, soon after, he made his appearance in her drawing-room, she gave him many a hint as to how to play his cards. But he irritated her by his slowness; he was too circumspect by half. It was only in the evening that he took a hand in the game. During the day he left Nora to her own affairs, and was in general neither more nor less attentive than if he had been a merely susceptible stranger. To spectators his present relation with the young girl was somewhat puzzling; though Mrs. Keith, by no ambiguous giving out, as Hamlet says, had diffused a sympathetic expectancy. Roger wondered again and again whether Nora had guessed his meaning. He observed in her at times, as he fancied, a sort of nervous