Page:Sheila and Others (1920).djvu/37

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
MRS. MONTROSE
25

to me. The troubled waters that shallower and less stable natures know, could never reach her. She had set sail upon that sea of calms into whose unplumbed depths the wreckage of past storms had long sunk from sight. She accepted such offerings as I ventured to make from time to time, with no undue expression of gratitude, but with becoming acknowledgment. A couple of supernumerary chairs a bed-couch that had retired from public view to the cellar (what a loss to the romance of modern literature the attic is!) and some odds and ends from the culinary department were, I remember, among the articles that changed hands in this way, more a relief to myself I suspect, than an acquisition to her.

The affair of the couch brought me the unexpected pleasure of coming face to face with Mr. Montrose. I looked him over with considerable interest. He was short and stocky after the manner of a certain type of Englishman and there proceeded from him the rankest smell of tobacco it was ever my lot to inhale. He wore a shabby great-coat and a stolid expression which from time to time relaxed into something that was to him evidently the equivalent of facetiousness. In fact it was