t, from inward convulsion to
convulsion, she had, before they reached their gate, pulled up in the
path. There was something her head had been full of these three or
four minutes, the intensest little tune of the music-box, and it made
its way to her lips now; belonging--for all the good it could do
her!--to the two or three sorts of solicitude she might properly
express.

"I hope _she_ has a fortune, if you don't mind my speaking of it:
I mean some of the money we didn't in _our_ time have--and that we
missed, after all, in our poor way and for what we then wanted of it,
so quite dreadfully."

She had been able to wreathe it in a grace quite equal to any he
himself had employed; and it was to be said for him also that he kept
up, on this, the standard. "Oh, she's not, thank goodness, at all
badly off, poor dear. We shall do very well. How sweet of you to have
thought of it! May I tell her that too?" he splendidly glared. Yes, he
glared--how couldn't he, with what his mind was really full of? But,
all the same, he came just here, by her vision, nearer than at any
other point to being a gentleman. He came quite within an ace of
it--with his taking from her thus the prescription of humility of
service, his consenting to act in the interest of her avidity, his
letting her mount that way, on his bowed shoulders, to the success in
which he could suppose she still believed. He couldn't know, he would
never know, that she had then and there ceased to believe in it--that
she saw as clear as the sun in the sky the exact manner in which,
between them, before they had done, the Murray Brushes, all zeal and
sincerity, all interest in her interesting case, would dish, would
ruin, would utterly destroy her. He wouldn't have needed to go on, for
the force and truth of this; but he did go on--he was as crashingly
consistent as a motorcar without a brake. He was visibly in love
with the idea of what they might do for her and of the rare "social"
opportunity that they would, by the same stroke, embrace. How he had
been offhand with it, how he had made it parenthetic, that he didn't
happen "personally" to know Basil French--as if it would have been at
all likely he _should_ know him, even _im_ personally, and as if he
could conceal from her the fact that, since she had made him her
overture, this gentleman's name supremely baited her hook! Oh, they
would help Julia Bride if they could--they would do their remarkable
best; but they woul