“Is it all over, Edward? I fancied that it must be soon;” and then she added, with a little timidity, “were you in time?
“In time! I was there for hours.” He knew very well what she meant, but it was a sort of pleasure to him to prolong the suspense. “Of course,” he said, slowly, “he could not be expected to recover at his age. Alicia should have known better than to have had--dances and things at his age.”
“Dances! I have had no time to speak to Ally. I didn’t know; oh, how dreadful, Edward, and the old man dying!”
“The old man wasn’t dying then,” he said, pettishly. “How were they to suppose he was going to die? He has often been a great deal worse. He was an old man who looked as if he might have lived forever.”
After this his wife made no remark, but furtively--her housewifely instincts not permitting her to see it go out before her eyes--stooped to the coal-box standing by to put something on the fire.
“Let it alone!” he said, angrily. “At such a moment to be poking among the coals! Do you know what has happened? Can’t you realize it a little? Here we have Penton on our hands--Penton! _That_ place to be furnished, fitted out, and lived in! How are we to do it? I am in such a perplexity I think as never man was. And instead of helping me, all your thoughts are taken up with mending the fire!”
Mrs. Penton sat down suddenly in the first chair. She put her hand upon her heart, which had begun to jump. “Then you were not in time? Oh, I thought so from the first. To go on wasting day after day, and he such an old man!”
And in the extreme excitement of the moment she began to cry a little, holding her hand upon her fluttering heart: “It was what I always feared: when there is a thing that is troublesome and difficult, that is always the thing that happens,” she cried.
Her husband did not make any immediate reply. He wheeled round in his turn and took up the poker, but presently threw it down again. “It is no use making a fuss over that now. It’s that fellow Rochford’s fault. By the way,” he said, turning round again sharply, “mind, Annie, I won’t have that young fellow coming here so much. It might not have mattered before, but now it’s out of character--entirely out of character. Mind what I say.”