“Have you--are you sure you have enough money?”
“No, I daresay not,” she answered with dreary inconsequence. “But it doesn’t matter!”
“What nonsense! Of course it matters. You must let me lend you some.”
She shuddered. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow of you.”
“Why not? You don’t know what you are saying, poor thing!”
“Look here---- ” His words were rough, but his voice was gentle. “For Heaven’s sake, don’t go and expose yourself--expose us”--for she had made a gesture expressive of entire disregard of all malign inferences with regard to herself--“to the whole household! It is bad enough already!”
He took her hand, and she ceased to weep, and looked up into the face of her supreme arbiter with a dull submission.
“You must take these three notes that I am going to give you,” he said authoritatively, “and go quietly up to your room and ring for the servant and ask for your bill and pay it--I can’t do all this for you, or I would--but I will order the trap to take you to the station in time for the 12:45!”
“Drive to the station with me,” she murmured.
“No, I must not do that, but I will tell you what I will do. As soon as you have made all your arrangements, we will take a little walk in the Park, shall we?”
He spoke like an ascetic, dealing himself out many penances, and but one indulgence. His tone throughout was businesslike and decided, he was no longer the quiet indifferent dreamer of dreams, but the efficient man of the world, the man of action; and the fanciful hysterical woman at his side was completely dominated by his decision, and stilled for the moment into something like acquiescence with her fate.
She carried out all his directions faithfully and accurately, and in less than half an hour, joined him in the road outside the inn, veiled and spectacled, and demure as a nun about to take the vow!
“I have told them,” he said, “to bring the trap round to the Park Gates to meet you. So you will not need to go back to the inn at all. We have just half an hour.”
“But you are wasting your whole morning’s work,” she said as they turned in at the Park Gates. It was the first thing that occurred to her to say.
“Oh, just for once!” he replied. “My work will have no cause to complain of me--after to-day.”