“Come out of this heat,” said Harcourt. He took her left arm and placed it within his; led her to a stone bench in the shade. She sat down with an impatient sigh, passed the back of the hand he had held impatiently over her wet forehead and closed her eyes. In her right hand, crushed upon her lap, the stained cambric lay hidden.
“Is not this better,” said her companion, as if he were speaking to a child, “out of that sunshine and the sickly smell of those flowers? Here we get the breeze from the woods and the scent of the hay. A sort of little heaven after a successful imitation of the infernal regions.”
“If you mean Hell, why don’t you say Hell?” said Lady Lochore. She laughed in that bitterness of soul that can find no expression but in irony. “Bah!” she went on, half to herself. “It’s no use trying not to believe in Hell, my friend; you have to, when you’ve got it in you! Look here,” she suddenly blazed her unhappy eyes upon him. “Look here, Tony—honour, now! How long do you give me?”
All the man’s superficial benevolence looked sadly at her from his handsome face.
“I am no doctor.”
“Faugh! Subterfuge!”
“Why, then, at the rate going, not three months,” said he. “But, with rational care, I’ve no doubt, as long as most.”
“Not three months!” She clenched her right hand convulsively and glanced down at the white folds escaping from her fingers as if they contained her death warrant. “Thank, you, Tony. You’re a beast at heart, like the rest of us, but you’re a gentleman. I am going at a rapid rate, am I not? Oh, God! I shouldn’t care—what’s beyond can’t be worse than what’s here. But it’s the child!”
The man made no answer. He had the tact of all situations. Here silence spoke the sympathy that was deeper than words. There was a pause, Lady Lochore drew her breath in gasps.
“It’s a pretty state of affairs here,” she said, at last, with her hard laugh.