"
He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing minute.
"Why, yes," he said at last.
Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him. Those two words,
Leonora said, gave her the greatest relief of any two syllables she
had ever heard in her life. For she realized that Edward was
breaking up, not under the desire for possession, but from the
dogged determination to hold his hand. She could relax some of
her vigilance.
Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind her half-closed
jalousies, looking over the street and the night and the trees until,
very late, she could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer and
saying:
"You did look an old guy with that false nose." There had been
some sort of celebration of a local holiday up in the Kursaal. And
Edward replied with his sort of sulky good nature:
"As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher."
The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp;
Edward, another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as
they had talked any time since the girl had been seventeen; with
the same tones, the same joke about an old beggar woman who
always amused them at Branshaw. The girl, a little later, opened
Leonora's door whilst she was still kissing Edward on the forehead
as she had done every night.
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