Carlin, and seemed to find this characteristic the sufficient justification for his faith.
"I used to know him very well, you know," remarked Mrs. Dennison, anxious to reach a more friendly footing, and realising that to connect herself with Ruston offered the best chance of it. "I daresay he's spoken of me – of Maggie Sherwood?"
They thought not, though Willie had been in Carlin's employ at the time when he and Mrs. Dennison parted. She was even able, by comparison of dates, to identify the holiday in which that scene had occurred and that sentence been spoken; but he had never mentioned her name. She very much doubted whether he had even thought of her. The fool and the fool's wife had both been dismissed from his mind. She frowned impatiently. Why should it be anything to her if they had?
There was a commotion among the children, starting from one who was perched on the window-sill. Ruston himself was walking up to the door, dressed in a light suit and a straw hat. After the greetings, while all were busy getting him tea, he turned to Mrs. Dennison.
"This is very kind of you," he said in an undertone.
"My husband wished me to come," she replied.
He seemed in good spirits. He laughed, as he answered,
"Well, I didn't suppose you came to please me."
"You spoke as if you did," said she, still trying to resent his tone, which she thought a better guide to the truth than his easy disclaimer.
"Why, you never did anything to please me!"
"Did you ever ask me?" she retorted.
He glanced at her for a moment, as he began to answer,
"Well, now, I don't believe I ever did; but I – "
Mrs. Carlin interposed with a proffered cup of tea, and he broke off.
"Thanks, Mrs. Carlin. I say, Carlin, it's going first-rate. Your husband's help's simply invaluable, Mrs. Dennison."
"Harry?" she said, in a tone that she regretted a moment later, for there was a passing gleam in Ruston's eye before he answered gravely,
"His firm carries great weight. Well, we're all in it here, sink or swim; aren't we, Carlin?"
Carlin nodded emphatically, and his wife gave an anxious little sigh.
"And what's to be the end of it?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
"Ten per cent," said Carlin, with conviction. He could not have spoken with more utter satisfaction of the millennium.
"The end?" echoed Ruston. "Oh, I don't know."
"At least he won't say," said Carlin admiringly.
Mrs. Dennison rose to go, engaging the Carlins to dine with her – an invitation accepted with some nervousness, until the extension of it to Ruston gave them a wing to come under. Ruston, with that directness of his that shamed mere dexterity and superseded tact, bade Carlin stay where he was, and himself escorted the visitor to her carriage. Half-way down the garden walk she looked up at him and remarked,
"I expect you're the end."
His eyes had been wandering, but they came back sharply to hers.
"Then don't tell anybody," said he lightly.
She did not know whether what he said amounted to a confession or were merely a jest. The next moment he was off at a tangent.
"I like your friend Miss Ferrars. She says a lot of sharp things, and now and then something sensible."
"Now and then! Poor Adela!"
"Well, she doesn't often try. Besides, she's handsome."
"Oh, you've found time to notice that?"
"I notice that first," said Mr. Ruston.
They were at the carriage-door.
"I'm not dressed properly, so I mustn't drive with you," he said.
"Supposing that was the only reason," she replied, smiling, "would it stop you?"
"Certainly."
"Why?"
"Because of other fools."
"I'll take you as far as Regent's Park. The other fools are on the other side of that."
"I'll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.
"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"
"I've been learning to think it less and to show it less still."
"You're not much changed, though."
"I've had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard substances."
"Thank you for that 'other'!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh. "They must have been very hard ones."
"I didn't say that they weren't a little bit injured too."
"Poor things! I should think so."
"I have my human side."
"Generally the other side, isn't it?" she asked with a merry glance. The talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.
"Next time," he said, "we'll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone before she could say a word to him.
But it was natural that she should think a little about him. She had not, she said to herself with a weary smile, too many interesting things to think about, and she began to find him decidedly interesting; in which fact again she found a certain strangeness and some material for reflection, because she recollected very well that as a girl she had not found him very attractive. Perhaps she demanded then more colouring of romance than he had infused into their intercourse; she had indeed suspected him of suppressed romance, but the suppression had been very thorough, betraying itself only doubtfully here and there, as in his judgment of her accepted suitor. Moreover, let his feelings then have been what they might, he was not, she felt sure, the man to cherish a fruitless love for eight or nine years, or to suffer any resurrection of expired emotions on a renewed encounter with an old flame. He buried his dead too deep for that; if they were in the way, she could fancy him sometimes shovelling the earth over them and stamping it down without looking too curiously whether life were actually extinct or only flickering towards its extinction; if it were not quite gone at the beginning of the gravedigger's work, it would be at the end, and the result was the same. Nor did she suppose that ghosts gibbered or clanked in the orderly trim mansions of his brain. In fact, she was to him a more or less pleasant acquaintance, sandwiched in his mind between Adela Ferrars and Marjory Valentine – with something attractive about her, though she might lack the sparkle of the one and had been robbed of the other's youthful freshness. This was the conclusion which she called upon herself to draw as she drove back from Hampstead – the plain and sensible conclusion. Yet, as she reached Curzon Street, there was a smile on her face; and the conclusion was hardly such as to make her smile – unless indeed she had added to it the reflection that it is ill judging of things till they are finished.
