tate of suspense. 'Well,' she thought with
resignation, 'I may as well play the wife,' and she sat down in a chair
near him, put her purse on the table, and smiled generously. Then she
raised her veil, loosed the buttons of her new black coat, and began to
draw off her gloves.

'I've been waiting for you,' he said, and to her surprise his tone was
extremely pacific.

'Have you?' she answered, intensifying all her alluring grace. 'I
hurried home.'

'Yes, I wanted to ask you----' He stopped, ostensibly to put the cigar
into his meerschaum holder.

She perceived that the desire to ingratiate fought within him against
his vexation, and she wondered, with a touch of cynicism, what new
scheme had got possession of him, and how her assistance was necessary
to it.

'Would you like to go and live in the country, Nora?' He looked at her
audaciously for a moment and then his eyes shifted.

'For the summer, you mean?'

'Yes,' he said, 'for the summer and the winter too. Somewhere out Sneyd
way.'

'And leave here?'

'Exactly.'

'But what about the house, Jack?'

'Sell it, if you like,' said John lightly.

'Oh, no! I shouldn't like that at all,' she replied, nervously but
amiably. She wished to believe that his suggestion about selling the
house was merely an idle notion thrown out on the spur of the moment,
but she could not.

'You wouldn't?'

She shook her head. 'What has made you think of going to live in the
country?' she asked him, using a tone of gentle, mild curiosity. 'How
should you get to the works in the morning?'

'There's a very good train service from Sneyd to Knype,' he said. 'But
look here, Nora, why wouldn't you care to sell the house?'

It was perfectly clear to her that, having mortgaged her house, he had
now made up his mind to sell it. He must therefore still be in
financial difficulties, and she had unwittingly misled Uncle Meshach.

'I don't know,' she answered coldly. 'I can't explain to you why. But I
shouldn't.' And she privately resolved that nothing should induce her to
assent to this monstrous proposal. Her heart hardened to steel. She felt
prepared to suffer any unpleasantness, any indignity, rather than give
way.

'It isn't as if Hillport wasn't changing,' he went on, politely
argumentative. 'It is changing. In another ten years all the decent
estates will have been broken up, and we shall be left alone in the
middle of streets of villas rented at nineteen guineas to escape the