Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/315

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THE BENCH OF DESOLATION
303

there against his heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. "I mean so much money—so extraordinarily much."

Well, she held him a while blank. "Does it seem to you extraordinarily much—twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know," she added, "it's all."

"It's enough!" he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness somehow on his cheek.

"It's enough? Thank you then!" she rather oddly went on.

He shifted a little his posture. "It was more than a hundred a year—for you to get together."

"Yes," she assented, "that was what year by year I tried for."

"But that you could live all the while and have that—!" Yes, he was at liberty, as he hadn't been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered—and didn't the change mean that here again was the social relation?

"Ah, I didn't live as you saw me the other day."

'Yes," he answered—and didn't he the next instant feel he must fairly have smiled with it?—"the other day you were going it!"

"For once in my life," said Kate Cookham. "I've left the hotel," she after a moment added.