“You look dreadfully tired,” he said, with that half-tone of offence in which a man shows his disappointment at the aspect of an invalid. “You must have been worried on the journey to look so tired.”
“Oh, no, I have not been at all worried on the journey--they have all been so good, sparing me every fatigue; but it is a tiresome long way, Edward, you know.”
“Yes, of course, I know: but I never saw you look so tired before.” He cast a reproachful look round upon the young people, who were all ready to stand on the defensive. “You must have bothered your mother to death,” he said. “I am sorry I did not come out for her myself--undoing all the effect of her cure.”
“Oh, you will see, I shall be all right when I get home,” Mrs. Kingsward said, cheerfully. “As for the children, Edward, they have all been as good as gold.”
“You had better see to the luggage and bring your sisters home in a cab. I can’t let mamma hang about here,” said the Colonel, in his peremptory way. “Moulsey will come with us. I suppose you three have brains enough to manage by yourselves?”
Thus insulting his grown-up children, among whom a flame of indignation lighted up, partially burning away their difficulties between themselves, Colonel Kingsward half carried his wife to the carriage. “I thought at first I should have waited at Kingswarden till you came back. I am glad I changed my mind and came back to Harley Street,” he said.
“Oh, is it to Harley Street we are going?” said Mrs. Kingsward, faintly. “I had rather hoped for the country, Edward.”
“You don’t look much like another twenty miles of a journey,” said her husband.
“Well, perhaps not. I own I shall be glad to be quiet,” the poor lady said. What he wished had always turned out after a moment to be just what his wife wished for all the years of their union. She even meekly accepted the fact that the children--the nursery children, as they were called--the little ones, who were no trouble but only a refreshment and delight, would have been too much for her that first night. Secretly, she had been looking forward to the touch and sight of her placid smiling baby as the one thing that would do her good--and all those large wet kisses of Johnny and Tommy and Lucy and little Margaret, and the burst of delighted voices at the sight of mamma. “Yes, I believe it would have been too much for me,” she said, with a look aside at Moulsey, who, as on many a previous occasion, would dearly have loved to box her master’s ears. “And I _do_ believe it would have been too much for me,” Mrs. Kingsward added, when that confidential attendant put her to bed.