“You don’t find it annoying?” he asked.
Her reply served notice upon him that she had caught his note of irony.
“Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all that.”
He glanced at the book she had been reading. It lay flung face downward with both backs spread out on the table, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” Blaydon recalled the story and somehow connected it in his mind with his sister’s essential solitude—her dependence upon his own family for affection.
“I suppose,” he pursued, the thought forming suddenly from nowhere, “that you are going to adopt her?”
Mathilda looked up sharply. She pretended to detect in his words more of approval than of inquiry and replied as though he had offered a suggestion.
“You’re not serious, Sterling?”
Blaydon’s intuition surprised him. He had struck fire, where hardly more than a joke had been intended.
“Why not?” he asked, with a good-natured shrug.
“It seems cruel, somehow,” she replied. Her tone was as detached as though she had said, “it seems too green,” of a dress-cloth.