I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap
on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced
him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of
scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his
landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
ran wet on his forehead.
I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which
the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-
reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
looked across the lawn at the high window.
I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
she knew.
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