able to keep back till other matters were disposed of.  It was the announcement that he was at last ready to marry—­that he saw his way.  A rise at Chalk Farm had been offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders.  Therefore their waiting was over—­it could be a question of a near date.  They would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye on a sweet little home.  He would take her to see it on their first Sunday.

CHAPTER XIX

His having kept this great news for the last, having had such a card up his sleeve and not floated it out in the current of his chatter and the luxury of their leisure, was one of those incalculable strokes by which he could still affect her; the kind of thing that reminded her of the latent force that had ejected the drunken soldier—­an example of the profundity of which his promotion was the proof.  She listened a while in silence, on this occasion, to the wafted strains of the music; she took it in as she had not quite done before that her future was now constituted.  Mr. Mudge was distinctly her fate; yet at this moment she turned her face quite away from him, showing him so long a mere quarter of her cheek that she at last again heard his voice.  He couldn’t see a pair of tears that were partly the reason of her delay to give him the assurance he required; but he expressed at a venture the hope that she had had her fill of Cocker’s.

She was finally able to turn back.  “Oh quite.  There’s nothing going on.  No one comes but the Americans at Thrupp’s, and they don’t do much.  They don’t seem to have a secret in the world.”

“Then the extraordinary reason you’ve been giving me for holding on there has ceased to work?”

She thought a moment.  “Yes, that one.  I’ve seen the thing through—­I’ve got them all in my pocket.”

“So you’re ready to come?”

For a little again she made no answer.  “No, not yet, all the same.  I’ve still got a reason—­a different one.”

He looked her all over as if it might have been something she kept in her mouth or her glove or under her jacket—­something she was even sitting upon.  “Well, I’ll have it, please.”

“I went out the other night and sat in the Park with a gentleman,” she said at last.

Nothing was ever seen like his confidence in her and she wondered a little now why it didn’t irritate her.  It only gave her ease and space, as she felt, for telling him the whole truth that no one knew.  It had arrived at present at her really wanting to do that, and yet to do it not in the least for Mr. Mudge, but altogether and only for herself.  This truth filled out for her there the whole experience about to relinquish, suffused and coloured it as a picture that she should keep and that, describe it