Alma sat motionless.  Her smile had passed, vanishing in a swift gleam of pleasure which left her countenance bright, though grave.  In the same moment there sounded again a rat-tat at the outer door.  Through his whirling senses, Harvey was aware of the threatened interruption, and all but cursed aloud.  That Alma had the same expectation appeared in her moving so as to assume a more ordinary attitude; but she uttered the word that had risen to her lips.

‘The misfortune, you call it?’

Harvey followed her example in disposing his limbs more conventionally; also in the tuning of his voice to something between jest and earnest.

‘I said perhaps the misfortune.’

‘It makes a difference, certainly.’  She smiled, her eyes turned to the door. ’Perhaps is a great word; one of the most useful in the language. —­ Don’t you think so, Mamma?’

Mrs. Frothingham had just entered.

CHAPTER 11

The inconceivable had come to pass.  By a word and a look Harvey had made real what he was always telling himself could never be more than a dream, and a dream of unutterable folly.  Mrs. Frothingham’s unconscious intervention availed him nothing; he had spoken, and must speak again.  For a man of sensitive honour there could be no trilling in such a matter as this with a girl in Alma Frothingham’s position.  And did he not rejoice that wavering was no longer possible?

This was love; but of what quality?  He no longer cared, or dared, to analyse it.  Too late for all that.  He had told Alma that he loved her, and did not repent it; nay, hoped passionately to hear from her lips the echoed syllable.  It was merely the proof of madness.  A shake of the head might cure him; but from that way to sanity all his blood shrank.

He must consider; he must be practical.  If he meant to ask Alma to marry him, and of course he did, an indispensable preliminary was to make known the crude facts of his worldly position.

Well, he could say, with entire honesty, that he had over nine hundred pounds a year.  This was omitting a disbursement of an annual fifty pounds, of which he need not speak —­ the sum he had insisted on paying Mrs. Abbott that she might be able to maintain Wager’s children.  With all the difficulty in the world had he gained his point.  Mrs. Abbott did not wish the children to go into other hands; she made it a matter of conscience to keep them by her, and to educate them, yet this seemed barely possible with the combat for a livelihood before her.  Mrs. Abbott yielded, and their clasp of hands cemented a wholesome friendship —­ frank, unsuspicious —­ rarest of relations between man and woman.  But all this there was certainly no need of disclosing.

At midnight he was penning a letter.  It must not be long; it must not strike the lyrical note; yet assuredly it must not read like a commercial overture.  He had great difficulty in writing anything that seemed tolerable.  Yet done it must be, and done it was; and before going to bed he had dropped his letter into the post.  He durst not leave it for reperusal in the morning light.