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and it would go to buy the clothes and the little intimate things with which Holly would go to her husband.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    W ARRINGTON SOLD THE BOND next day and brought the money back. It was a coupon bond, and it went out with an odd lot from the office. Save for a sense of responsibility as to the safe carriage of the currency in his pocket—Mrs. Bayne had asked for currency—the transaction was ended, so far as he was concerned.
    He took the money back that night, buttoned inside his coat against pickpockets, and he walked part of the way. He had found that walking until he was dog tired was the only way he could sleep, just then.
    Furness Brooks’s car was at the curb as usual, and so Warrington passed the open drawing-room door without a glance. He had a dread of seeing Holly and her lover together, of having their new intimacy thrust at him by some glance or gesture. But as a matter of fact, there was hardly a chance of that. It was, by and large, a strange wooing. …
    “Come over and sit by me, Holly, won’t you?”
    “I can talk better here.”
    If Furness insisted, she would go reluctantly, and the hand he held was often cold as ice. But she was gentleness and acquiescence itself to him, as if she would make up in this way for her failure in the other.
    Fortunately Furness liked to talk. He was already planning for the wedding, seeing in it that one moment when he would hold the centre of the stage and not be “filling in.” He and Holly. He was determined that the wedding should be correct in every detail.
    “It’s a pity Sam Parker’s thinking of going abroad. He’s the logical person to give you away.”
    There were times, of course, when his passion got the better of his common sense, when his wooing became instead a sort of fierce gesture of possession. Once, carried away by it, he went too far with her, and she struck him with her closed fist and slammed out of the room. But he knew he had been wrong, and he left her no loophole of escape. He apologized by note that night and flowers the next morning, and she had to come back to him, a trifle wary, perhaps, but still his. …
    Warrington, of course, had no idea of this. He was still seeing the household through an occasional peephole: tramping up the stairs past Mrs. Bayne’s room, where, if her door was open, he could see her busy now with endless memoranda, past Holly’s little chamber, with its tidy virginal white bed and its blue curtains—he always tried very hard not to glance into that room—and so on to his own lonely quarters, where a pair of military brushes on the dresser and the books on a table were all that marked it his.
    So that night he went up the stairs, and Mrs. Bayne, hearing the creak of the loose step outside, followed him up.
    He gave her the money. He had an idea that it was more money than she had held in her hands for many years, but she was as calm as a May morning.
    “By the way,” he said, “I hope you don’t keep things like that lying around the house. They’re negotiable, you know.”
    “Just what do you mean?”
    “Bonds like that are much the same as currency. They can be stolen and sold.”
    Afterward he was to remember that she made an odd little startled gesture, but she said nothing for a moment. Then:
    “I see,” she said quietly. “Thank you for telling me.” She moved to the door and paused there irresolutely.
    “I’ll be very careful,” she said, and added irrelevantly, her eyes on the package of currency in her hand: “There are certain sacrifices one must make at times like this. I dare say you know that my daughter is to be married?”
    “I saw it in the paper. Yes.”
    “She is marrying very well,” she said, still in that curious irresolute manner. “Very well indeed.”
    Suddenly all his resentment and anger flared up in him. He could hardly control his voice.
    “That depends, of course, on how you look at it.”
    “I don’t understand you.”
    “If she cares for the man