THE BETTER SORT
Marshal, but that was a thing she needn't mind now, and he had already continued. "She'll keep nothing back. And you mustn't either."
"Oh, won't I?" Maud murmured.
"Then you'll break faith with her."
And, as if to emphasise it, he went on, though without leaving her an infinite time to decide, for he looked at his watch as they proceeded, and when they came, in their spacious walk, abreast of another issue, where the breadth of the avenue, the expanses of stone, the stretch of the river, the dimness of the distance, seemed to isolate them, he appeared, by renewing their halt and looking up afresh toward the town, to desire to speed her on her way. Many things meanwhile had worked within her, but it was not till she had kept him on past the Temple Station of the Underground that she fairly faced her opportunity. Even then too there were still other things, under the assault of which she dropped, for the moment, Mrs. Chorner. "Did you really," she asked, "believe he'd turn up alive?"
With his hands in his pockets he continued to gloom at her. "Up there, just now, with Marshal—what did you take me as believing?"
"I gave you up. And I do give you. You're beyond me. Only," she added, "I seem to have made you out since then as really staggered. Though I don't say it," she ended, "to bear hard upon you."
"Don't bear hard," said Howard Bight very simply.
It moved her, for all she could have said; so that she had for a moment to wonder if it were bearing hard to mention some of features of the rest of her thought. If she was to have him, certainly, it couldn't be without knowing, as she said to herself, something—something she might perhaps mitigate a little the solitude of his penance by possessing. "There were moments when I even imagined that, up to a certain point, you were still in communication with him. Then
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