too as it sought hers.
“I only thought—it would be a dull business to most women—and I’m tied to it for life…but I thought…I’ve seen so often how you pity suffering…how you long to relieve it….”
She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. “Oh, I hate suffering!” she broke out, raising her hands to her face.
Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself—to have let the man in him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy bush of philanthropy.
“I only meant—I was trying to make my work recommend me…” he said with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.
The silence continued for a long time—it stretched between them like a narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her close to him—felt her hand in his.
“I’m really just like other women, you know—I shall like it because it’s your work,” she said. XXXII
EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely well.
He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the will—to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture, while reducing Cicely’s income during her minority, might, in some incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr. Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in- law’s marriage.
The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by the farthest stretch of self- extenuating logic, he could find no one to blame for the event but himself.
“Why on earth don’t you say so—don’t you call me a triple-dyed fool for bringing them together?” he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York apartment.
Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge composedly.
“At present you’re doing it for me,” she reminded him; “and after all, I’m not so disposed to agree with you.”
“Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn’t you tell me not to engage her?”
She made a hesitating motion of assent.
“But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a quandary!” he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.
“No,” she said, looking up at him suddenly. “I believe that, for the only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn’t married me.”
She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.
“Oh, come—you’ve inverted the formula,” he said, reaching out for the enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: “Why didn’t you want me to engage Miss Brent?”
“Oh, I don’t know…some instinct.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t if I tried; and now, after all–-“
“After all—what?”
She reflected. “You’ll have Cicely off your mind, I mean.”
“Cicely off my mind?” Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous woman has her circuitous way of saying I told you so. “As if any good
