She dared not reply, for fear her voice would betray her.
When they reached the hotel he went up to his wife’s room, hoping to find her physically better, and less querulous for her rest. She was lying on the bed, covered with a thick eider-down quilt, and turned slowly to look at him as he came in tiptoe.
“I was just going to sleep, and now you’ve roused me up,” she complained, and turned away again.
“I’m so sorry, dearie; it was clumsy of me,” he said, going round the bed, and sitting down on the side. He took her hand, which she let lie passively in his.
“My head’s not aching so much, at least not quite.”
“That’s fine. ‘Once on the mend, soon at an end.’”
“Just along the front with Alice, nearly to Hove. The wind’s jolly cold.”
“Jolly? It’s horrid; Brighton’s horrid: too cold to go out, and the hotel is so stuffy.”
“Is it? I hadn’t noticed it. But I do wish you would go out more. You know what the doctor said—lots of fresh air.”
“But he didn’t tell me to go out when it was so cold it gave me neuralgia all over my head.”
“Let me ring and we’ll have tea up here. It’ll cheer you up.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t always treat me like a child!” she said pettishly; “so long as you give me pretty things or feed me with sweets you think I’m happy.”
“Not?” he repeated, as he stood up and started to walk about the room. “I thought you were, dear. What can I do? I’ve always tried my best to give you what you wanted.”
“Please don’t walk about like that, you don’t know what a headache is. You—don’t understand things.”
“Don’t I?” he asked, standing with his back to the fire; “then why not try to teach me?”
“You always think you know everything, and are always right and that I’m always wrong. But I’m right sometimes.”
“Why, Aggy, what on earth have I done to deserve such a slating?”
As she did not make any reply he went across to the bedside, and, stooping down, kissed her, upon which she turned impatiently away.
“If you don’t want me to treat you as a child you shouldn’t behave like one,” he said, and, after a moment’s hesitation, walked out of the room.
WHILE the sun was shining cheerily at Brighton the rain was pouring down drearily in London, Acacia Grove looking its very worst under the leaden sky; the roadway a sea of mud, the leafless branches of the trees dripping and streaming, the evergreen shrubs in the scrubby gardens none the less dirty for their washing; even the sharp rat-tat, rat-tat, of the postman as he went from house to house sounding dismal, as if all the letters he bore must announce death or disaster.