TONY went toward his messenger, who, as she saw Rose apparently leaving the garden, pressingly called out: “ Would you. Miss Armiger, very kindly go over for Effie? She wasn’t even yet ready,” she explained as she came back up the slope with her friend, “ and I was afraid to wait after promising Paul to meet him.”
“He’s not here, you see,” said Tony; “it’s he who, most ungallantly, makes you wait. Never mind; you’ll wait with me.” He looked at Rose as they overtook her. “Will you go and bring the child, as our friend here asks, or is such an act as that also, and still more, inconsistent with your mysterious principles? ”
“You must kindly excuse me,” Rose said directly to Jean. “ I’ve a letter to write in the house. Now or never I must catch the post.”
“Don’t let us keep you, then,” Tony returned, “I’ll go over myself as soon as Paul comes back.”
“I’ll send him straight out.” And Rose Armiger retired in good order.
Tony followed her with his eyes; then he ex claimed: “ It’s, upon my soul, as if she couldn’t trust herself!” His remark, which he checked,
dropped into a snap of his fingers while Jean Martle wondered.
“To do what?” she asked.
Tony hesitated. “To do nothing! The child’s all right? ”
“Perfectly right. It’s only that the great Gorham has decreed that she’s to have her usual little supper before she comes, and that, with her ribbons and frills all covered with an enormous bib, Effie had just settled down to that extremely solemn function.”
Tony in his turn wondered. “Why shouldn’t she have her supper here? ”
“Ah, you must ask the great Gorham! ”
“And didn’t you ask her? ”
“I did better I divined her,” said Jean. “She doesn’t trust our kitchen.”
Tony laughed. “ Does she apprehend poison? ”
“She apprehends what she calls ‘ sugar and spice.’ ”
“‘And all that’s nice?’ Well, there’s too much that’s nice here, certainly! Leave the poor child then, like the little princess you all make of her, to her cook and her ( taster,’ to the full rigour of her royalty, and stroll with me here till Paul comes out to you.” He looked at his watch and about at the broad garden where the shadows of the trees were still and the long afternoon had grown rich. “ This is remarkably peaceful, and there’s plenty of time.” Jean concurred with a murmur as soft as the stir of the breeze, a “ Plenty, plenty,” as serene as if, to oblige Tony Bream, so charming a day would be sure to pause in its passage. They went a few steps, but he stopped again with a question. “Do you know what Paul wants of you? ”
Jean looked a moment at the grass by her feet. “I think I do.” Then raising her eyes without shy ness, but with unqualified gravity, “ Do you know, Mr. Bream?” she asked.
“Yes I’ve just now heard.”
“From Miss Armiger? ”
“From Miss Armiger. She appears to have had it from Paul himself.”
The girl gave out her mild surprise. “ Why has he told her? ”
Tony hesitated. “ Because she’s such a good person to tell things to.”
“Is it her immediately telling them again that makes her so?” Jean inquired with a faint smile.
Faint as this smile was, Tony met it as if he had been struck by it, and as if indeed, in the midst of an acquaintance which four years had now conse crated, he had not quite got used to being struck. That acquaintance had practically begun, on an un forgettable day, with his opening his eyes to it from an effort which had been already then the effort to forget his suddenly taking her in as he lay on the sofa in his hall. From the way he sometimes looked at her it might have been judged that he had even now not taken her in completely that the act of slow, charmed apprehension had yet to melt into accepted knowledge. It had in truth been made continuous by the continuous expansion of its object. If the sense of lying there on the sofa still sometimes came back to Tony, it was because he was interested in not interrupting by a rash motion the process taking place in the figure before him, the capricious rotation by which the woman peeped out of the child and the child peeped out of the woman. There was no point at which it had begun and none at which it would end, and it was a thing to gaze at with an attention refreshingly baffled. The frightened child had become a tall, slim nymph on a cloud, and yet there had been no moment of anything so gross as catching her in the act of change. If there had been he would have met it with some punctual change of his own; whereas it was his luxurious idea unob-scured till now that in the midst of the difference so delightfully ambiguous he was free just not to change, free to remain as he was and go on liking her on trivial grounds. It had seemed to him that there was no one he had ever liked whom he could like quite so comfortably: a man of his age had had what he rather loosely called the “ usual ” flashes of fondness. There had been no worrying question of the light this particular flash might kindle; he had never had to ask himself what his appreciation of Jean Martle might lead to. It would lead to exactly nothing that had been settled all round in advance. This was a happy, lively provision that kept every thing down, made sociability a cool, public, out-of-door affair, without a secret or a mystery confined it, as one might say, to the breezy, sunny forecourt of the temple of friendship, forbidding it any dream of access to the obscure and comparatively stuffy interior. Tony had acutely remarked to himself that a thing could be led to only when there was a practi cable road. As present to him today as on that other day was the little hour ot violence so strange and sad and sweet which in his life had effectually suppressed any thoroughfare, making this expanse so pathless that, had he not been looking for a philosophic rather than a satiric term, he might almost have compared it to a desert. He answered his companion’s inquiry about Rose’s responsibility as an informant after he had satisfied himself that if she smiled exactly as she did it was only another illustration of a perfect instinct. That instinct, which at any time turned all talk with her away from flatness, told her that the right attitude for her now was the middle course between anxiety and resignation. “If Miss Armiger hadn’t spoken,” he said, “ I shouldn’t have known. And of course I’m in terested in knowing.”
“But why is she interested in your doing so? ” Jean asked.
Tony walked on again. “ She has several reasons. One of them is that she greatly likes Paul and that, greatly liking him, she wishes the highest happiness conceivable for him. It occurred to her that as I greatly like a certain young lady I might not unnaturally desire for that young lady a corresponding chance, and that with a hint,” laughed Tony, “that she really is about to have it, I might perhaps see my way to putting in a word for the dear boy in advance.”
The girl strolled beside him, looking quietly before her. “ How does she know,” she demanded, “whom you ‘ greatly like ’? ”
The question pulled him up a little, but he resisted the impulse, constantly strong in him, to stop again and stand face to face with her. He continued to laugh and after an instant he replied: “ Why, I suppose I must have told her.”
“And how many persons will she have told? ”
“I don’t care how many,” Tony said, “ and I don’t think you need care either. Every one but she from lots of observation knows we’re good friends, and it’s because that’s such a pleasant old story with us all that I feel as if I might frankly say to you what I have on my mind.”
“About what Paul............