"I'm not at all," she denied stoutly. "Why should I bother about him—now?"
For answer he drew forward the biggest arm-chair and gently made her sit down. The slight hollow of her delicate cheek, the dark circles under the eyes, caused him acute suffering.
"Seriously, Esther, when I think of what you have been through, when I think that it must have left a terrible impression on you and that nothing I can do can remove that impression, it is almost more than I can bear. I feel it is all our fault."
"How perfectly absurd! It was nobody's fault. And you ought to be thankful it has turned out as it has. I am, I can tell you. As for me, I shall get over this, don't worry! I'm not neurotic or anything queer, whatever that man wanted to make you believe. I am really frightfully normal."
"Yes, thank God! I feel an ass to think I could ever have doubted it."
"I don't know. When I think what I must have looked like bursting in on you that night—a sort of Curfew-Shall-Not-Ring-To-night, I suppose—I don't wonder at anyone's thinking me a lunatic. How I ever got there at all is a mystery to me. I believe I was unconscious part of the time. I scarcely remember it; the whole thing seems like a sort of feverish nightmare. When the taxi came to a standstill I simply gave everything up for lost. I only set out to walk that last mile in a sort of dogged desperation; I never thought I should get there, or that if I did it would be in time. It was all uphill, too. I remember the perspiration running in trickles with the rain down my face, all in my eyes, so that I could scarcely see. Every little while I just toppled over altogether and lay on the sidewalk. It was the purest good luck that I wasn't run in for a drunken person. That would have finished it!"
"My dear!"
"Oh, well, let's not talk about it any more. I want to forget all that part of it—if I can."
He sat down close to her on the window-seat, silent for a moment. Then he said:
"Esther, tell me one thing. What first put the suspicion into your head that there was something not quite straight about my father's illness?"