Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”
Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.
“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient time—inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”
“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you—”
“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I? Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse—the same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital—put in her head and said brightly:
“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”
Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.
Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room, though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.