“But if you go,” he appealed—and with a sense as of final flatness, however he arranged it, for his own attitude—“but if you go sha’n’t I see you again?”
She waited a little, and it was strangely for him now as if—though at last so much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with his—something still depended on her. “Do you like to see me?” she very simply asked.
At this he did get up; that was easier than to say—at least with responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his utmost, in some air of assurance, he slipped into the inner pocket of his coat, letting it settle there securely. “You’re too wonderful.” But he frowned at her with it as never in his life. “Where does it all come from?”
“The wonder of poor me?” Kate Cookham said. “It comes from you.”
He shook his head slowly—feeling, with his letter there against his heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. “I mean so much money—so extraordinarily much.”
Well, she held him a while blank. “Does it seem to you extraordinarily much—twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know,” she added, “it’s all.”
“It’s enough!” he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness somehow on his cheek.
“It’s enough? Thank you then!” she rather oddly went on.
He shifted a little his posture. “It was more than a hundred a year—for you to get together.”
“Yes,” she assented, “that was what year by year I tried for.”