“What do you come bothering about?” he said; “you ought to have left me alone. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I don’t suppose that anyone has taken the trouble to--ask about me?” he added, after a little while, in what was intended for a careless tone.
“Oh, Charlie, everyone who has known; but papa would let nobody know: except at Oxford. We--went to Oxford----”
He got up on his pillow with his eyes shining out of their hollow sockets, his long limbs coming to the ground with a faint thump. Poor Charlie was young enough to have grown during his illness, and those gaunt limbs seemed unreasonably long.
“You went to Oxford!” he said, “and you saw--”
“Dear Charlie, they will say I am exciting you--doing you harm----”
“You saw?” he cried, bringing down his fist upon the table with a blow that made the very floor shake.
“Yes,” said Bee, trembling, “we saw--or rather papa saw----”
He pushed up the shade of the lamp with his long bony fingers, and fixed his eyes, bright with fever, on her face.
“Oh, Charlie, don’t look at me so!--the lady whom you used to talk to me about--whom I saw in the academy----”
“Yes?”--he grasped her hand across the table with a momentary hot pressure.
“She came and saw papa in the hotel. She told him about you, and that you had--oh, Charlie, and she so old--as old as----”
“Hold your tongue!” he cried, violently, and then with a long-drawn breath, “What more? She told him--and he was rude, I suppose. Confound him! Confound--confound them all!”
“I will not say another word unless you are quiet,” said Bee, her spirit rising; “put up your feet on the sofa and be quiet, and remember all the risk you are running--or I will not say another word.”
He obeyed her with murmurs of complaint, but no longer with the languid gloom of his first accost. Hope seemed to have come into his heart. He subdued himself, lay back among his pillows, obeyed her in all she stipulated. The light from underneath the raised shade played on his face and gave it a tinge of colour, though it showed more clearly the emaciation of the outlines and the aspect of neglect, rather than, as poor Charlie hoped, of enhanced manly dignity, conveyed by the irregular sick man’s growth of the infant beard.