or Bill
Frankle?--as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money
to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn't marry me. I was
only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn't happened;
and perhaps," he added the next instant with something of a conscious
lapse from the finer style, "hadn't been in question."

She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he
had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her
something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for
a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window
again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of
her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, "Oh, the blind,
the pitiful folly!"--to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her
own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on.
"Have it then that there wasn't much to do--between your finding that
you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to
the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself."

Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised
that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly--not so
_very!_--take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it
wasn't to perjure himself with any pretence that, "another woman" or no
other woman, he hadn't, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was
taking tea with her--or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this
made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he
distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under
favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a
young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had
never before conversed. Dodd's own position was that of acquiescing in
this recall of what had so bitterly been--but he hadn't come back to
her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for _her_
it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she
touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she _was_ indeed,
and all overwhelmingly, touching everything--with a hand of which the
boldness grew.

"But I didn't let _that_, even, make a difference in what I
wanted--which was all," she said, "and had only and passionately been,
to take care of you. I had _no_ money whatever--nothing then of my own