nd with
the very low-class guard of an old silver watch buttoned away under an
ill-made coat, to whom he was sacrificed.

It came to Herbert as he left the place a shade less remarkable--though
there was still wonder enough and to spare--that he had been even
publicly and designedly sacrificed; exactly so that, as the door closed
behind him, Kate Cookham, standing there to wait for it, could seem to
say, across the room, to the friend of her youth, only by the expression
of her fine eyes: "There--see what I do for you!" "For" him--that was
the extraordinary thing, and not less so that he was already, within
three minutes, after this fashion, taking it in as by the intensity of a
new light; a light that was one somehow with this rich inner air of
the plush-draped and much-mirrored hotel, where the fire-glow and
the approach of evening confirmed together the privacy, and the loose
curtains at the wide window were parted for a command of his old
lifelong Parade--the field of life so familiar to him from below and in
the wind and the wet, but which he had never in all the long years hung
over at this vantage.

"He's an acquaintance, but a bore," his hostess explained in respect to
Captain Roper. "He turned up yesterday, but I didn't invite him, and I
had said to him before you came in that I was expecting a gentleman with
whom I should wish to be alone. I go quite straight at my idea that way,
as a rule; but you know," she now strikingly went on, "how straight I
go. And he had had," she added, "his tea."

Dodd had been looking all round--had taken in, with the rest, the
brightness, the distinguished elegance, as he supposed it, of the
tea-service with which she was dealing and the variously tinted appeal
of certain savoury edibles on plates. "Oh but he _hadn't_ had his tea!"
he heard himself the next moment earnestly reply; which speech had at
once betrayed, he was then quickly aware, the candour of his interest,
the unsophisticated state that had survived so many troubles. If he was
so interested how could he be proud, and if he was proud how could he be
so interested?

He had made her at any rate laugh outright, and was further conscious,
for this, both that it was the first time of that since their new
meeting, and that it didn't affect him as harsh. It affected him,
however, as free, for she replied at once, still smiling and as a part
of it: "Oh, I think we shall get on!"

This told him he had made some differenc