in Charles Street was
arranged during a visit that Selah Tarrant paid there at Miss
Chancellor's request. This interview, which had some curious features,
would be worth describing but I am forbidden to do more than mention the
most striking of these. Olive wished to have an understanding with him;
wished the situation to be clear, so that, disagreeable as it would be
to her to receive him, she sent him a summons for a certain hour--an
hour at which she had planned that Verena should be out of the house.
She withheld this incident from the girl's knowledge, reflecting with
some solemnity that it was the first deception (for Olive her silence
was a deception) that she had yet practised on her friend, and wondering
whether she should have to practise others in the future. She then and
there made up her mind that she would not shrink from others should they
be necessary. She notified Tarrant that she should keep Verena a long
time, and Tarrant remarked that it was certainly very pleasant to see
her so happily located. But he also intimated that he should like to
know what Miss Chancellor laid out to do with her; and the tone of this
suggestion made Olive feel how right she had been to foresee that their
interview would have the stamp of business. It assumed that complexion
very definitely when she crossed over to her desk and wrote Mr. Tarrant
a cheque for a very considerable amount. "Leave us alone--entirely
alone--for a year, and then I will write you another": it was with these
words she handed him the little strip of paper that meant so much,
feeling, as she did so, that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not be
less amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss
Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor, at the
clock, and once more at his hostess; then the document disappeared
beneath the folds of his waterproof, and she saw that he was putting it
into some queer place on his queer person. "Well, if I didn't believe
you were going to help her to develop," he remarked; and he stopped,
while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight, and he treated Olive
to his large joyless smile. She assured him that he need have no fear on
that score; Verena's development was the thing in the world in which she
took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free
expansion. "Yes, that's the great thing," Selah said; "it's more
important than attracting a crowd. That's all we shall ask of yo