It was just at this peaceful period that an invitation came for him to join the camp of a well-known sportsman on a tiger-shooting expedition, an opportunity that no man, however uxorious a husband--and especially a man like Coventry, with whom sport had always been a passion--could easily resist without regret. And yet he hesitated. He could not honestly feel that he did not want to go, and yet he could have wished that Markham had not remembered him, had not thought of giving him this tempting chance, or that the letter had miscarried on the way and never reached him.
When he opened the letter he and Trixie were seated at their early breakfast in the veranda, attended by a greedy and devoted gathering of pets. Two well-disciplined fox terriers watched in quivering impatience for scraps of toast, obediently oblivious of a pair of Persian kittens that clawed and mewed and sprang in unmannerly fashion; a noisy green parrot in a dome-shaped cage; a monkey that jumped and jabbered on the back of the memsahib's chair; a tame squirrel that darted to and fro with bead-like eyes and feathery tail, even a greater trial to the dogs than the Persian kittens. Trixie worshipped animals and children; indeed, she had one day scandalised the general's wife by declaring, most immodestly as that lady considered, that she intended to have twenty babies, but, meanwhile, she could content herself with dogs and cats and monkeys.
Coventry threw the letter across the table to his wife; he half hoped she would read it with dismay, and show reluctance that he should accept the invitation. This, he felt, would give him just the excuse he wanted to refuse it, would put a definite obstacle in the way of acceptance instead of his being left at the mercy of conflicting inclinations. He watched her read the letter, but her expression did not cloud; on the contrary, it brightened.
"Oh, George!" she cried, looking up at him with shining eyes, "how lovely for you, and how I wish I could come too! I'd give anything to ride an elephant all day, and see tigers charge, and hear them roar, and then wear a necklace of their claws!"
"Markham won't have women on his shoots. He says it degrades the sport to the level of garden party games!" said Coventry.
"Oh, what a pig he must be!"
"Anyway, it would be far too rough for you, and the heat would be awful in tents. I'm not at all sure that I like the idea of it myself."
"You surely can't mean that you are dreaming of refusing?" cried Trixie, in amazed reproach. "Of course, you must go. He asks you to wire, so you must answer at once. Shall I get a telegraph form?"
"I'm not particularly keen on going," he said, with affected carelessness.
"I don't believe it! I am sure you are aching to wire and say you are coming. If you are pretending that you don't want to go because you think I shall be lonely, you can put that out of your head at once. I shan't miss you a bit."