"Supposing I were to die," Traill repeated. He leant his elbows on the table and gazed steadily into her eyes.
"Why should you talk like that?" she pleaded, and all the while through her brain scampered the questions—"Does he mean if he were to die? Doesn't he mean if he were to leave me?" They danced a mad dance behind her eyes. Had he looked deep enough, he might have seen their capers.
"Because that sort of thing has to be talked," he said gently. "You haven't the faintest idea whether I've made any provision for you or not. I've often wondered would you ask, but you've never said a word. Aren't you rather foolish? Do you think you take enough care for yourself? Do you think you look far enough into the future? Don't you think you treat life too much in the same way as you did my offer of the umbrella on the top of the Hammersmith 'bus?"
Many another woman would have had it out then; flung the questions at him, preferring knowledge rather than torture of mind. To Sally this was impossible. Again she showed those same characteristics of her father. She hoped against almost all absence of promise; she had faith in the face of the blackest doubt. He had said—if he died—perhaps he meant that. Yet the kissing of his sister lifted like the shadow in a dream before her eyes. She knew he had been with Mrs. Durlacher that afternoon. Could she have won him still further? Sally knew her own impotence—bowed under it, recognized fully how powerless she was to hold him if once the links in the chain of their caring began to lose their grip. And now, he was offering to make provision for her. Inevitably that seemed to be the beginning of the end. Before, she was his, with that emotional phrase in her mind—as God had made them. Now she was to become his, because he had bought her, paid for her. There lay in that the difference between two worlds in her mind; and she fought against it with what strength she knew.
"I don't want to look into the future," she said bravely. "I hate looking into the future. I'm happy in the present; why shouldn't I remain so?"
"How will this prevent you? Doesn't it appeal to you at all, that when we came to live together, I took up a certain responsibility with you? I've got to fulfil that responsibility. This evening, when we go back, I'm going to draw out some form of settlement which I intend to place with you. I shall take it to my solicitor and get it legalized to-morrow morning."
She leant forward across the table and touched his hand again. Her lips were trembling; her whole face, which only a few moments before was bright with cheerfulness, was now drawn, pinched with the suffering and terror in her mind.
"Please don't," she said brokenly. "Please don't. I don't want any settlement as long as you care for me. What is a settlement to me if, as you say, you were to die? What good would it be to me then? Do you think I could bear to go On living?"
He searched her face with amazement. "You mustn't talk foolishness like this," he replied firmly, but not unkindly. "We've all got our own lives to get through. We've all got to answer for them one by one, and live them one by one as well. There's no condition of relationship in existence, which can make a man and a woman one person except in their imaginations and according to the fairy tales of the Church. You're a dear, simple, little child to talk about not being able to go on living if I were to peg out; but you would. You'd go on living. There's no doubt in my mind, but that you'd love some one else again."
"You little understand me," she exclaimed bitterly, "if you could ever think that."