dness this
posture gave him, he yet clung to it as the last shred of his honour,
to the clear argument that it was one thing for him to have felt beneath
all others, the previous days, that she was to be counted on, but quite
a different for her to have felt that _he_ was. His checked approach,
arriving thus at no term, could in these odd conditions have established
that he wasn't only if Kate Cookham had, as either of them might have
said, taken it so--if she had given up the game at last by rising, by
walking away and adding to the distance between them, and he had then
definitely let her vanish into space. It became a fact that when she did
finally rise--though after how long our record scarce takes on itself to
say--it was not to confirm their separation but to put an end to it; and
this by slowly approaching him till she had come within earshot He had
wondered, once aware of it in spite of his averted face, what she would
say and on what note, as it were, she would break their week's
silence; so that he had to recognise anew, her voice reaching him, that
remarkable quality in her which again and again came up for him as her
art.

"There are twelve hundred and sixty pounds, to be definite, but I have
it all down for you--and you've only to draw."

They lost themselves, these words, rare and exquisite, in the wide
bright genial medium and the Sunday stillness, but even while that
occurred and he was gaping for it she was herself there, in her battered
ladylike truth, to answer for them, to represent them, and, if a further
grace than their simple syllabled beauty were conceivable, almost
embarrassingly to cause them to materialise. Yes, she let her smart and
tight little reticule hang as if it bulged, beneath its clasp, with the
whole portentous sum, and he felt himself glare again at this vividest
of her attested claims. She might have been ready, on the spot, to open
the store to the plunge of his hand, or, with the situation otherwise
conceived, to impose on his pauperised state an acceptance of alms on
a scale unprecedented in the annals of street charity. Nothing so much
counted for him, however, neither grave numeral nor elegant fraction,
as the short, rich, rounded word that the breeze had picked up as it
dropped and seemed now to blow about between them. "To draw--to draw?"
Yes, he gaped it as if it had no sense; the fact being that even while
he did so he was reading into her use of the term more romance th