"I hadn't realized you were going so soon, you see. That will add to the difficulties, I'm afraid. Donald says you expect to leave on the 20th."
He meant his rejoinders to be unanswerable, and she seemed to find them so. Glancing up from his cuff in the silence, Charles found his famous friend's eyes fixed upon him in a strange gaze, which her lids and lashes veiled at once. Had that look struck him from any other eyes in the world, he would have labeled it reproachful, without the smallest hesitation. But Mary was never reproachful: she scarcely thought enough of him for that; and, besides, the shoe was on the other foot, as she should know very well.
"I did say something of the sort last week, I believe—though no day was really settled on. But it was very nice of you," she went on naturally enough, but with too evident a wish to shift the conversation, "to take so much trouble about it to-day. I do appreciate all your interest in it—and I do believe it's going to turn out right, too. Donald certainly left me with that feeling, this afternoon. So don't let's bother about it any more now," said Mary. "I'd much rather hear—some more about your writing. I hope you've gotten the book well started now?"
But Charles, unique among the writers of the world, did not want to talk about himself to-day. No, he had found the topic for him now.
"No!—I haven't, I'm sorry to say. Your arrangements are all made, aren't they? Judge Blenso tells me you're going to live with Sophy Stein, who used to run the Pure Food laboratories here?"
Again her brief look seemed to thrust upon him like a hand, and again her reply glanced off:—
"Yes—I was planning to live with her. You knew her, didn't you, when—"
"I was going to say—if everything is arranged, perhaps you wouldn't need to start so early.... Of course, the idea of your friends here would be that you should wait till the last day."
As she neither approved nor rejected this amiable suggestion, Charles said: "How does that idea appeal to you?"
To his surprise, instead of answering his question, Mary rose abruptly and went over to her desk. He then assumed that she wished to show him some letter bearing on her arrangements for her new life. But it seemed that her movement had no such object. She merely stood there a moment, fingering her papers in an irresolute sort of way; and then, without a word, she moved a little farther, and stood, looking out of the window.