He felt proud, delighted, as if he had gained a victory over her.
“Done. If it’s not too hard. What is it?”
“You won’t write to anybody. You won’t tell anybody that you’ve seen me. Only Lady Lumley knows that I am here. And she has promised not to tell. Probably, soon, I shall have left France for ever.”
“I won’t tell. I won’t write. I can keep secrets as well as Lady Lumley. She does keep them, you know. So it’s a compact.”
“Yes. It’s a compact. You’ll never tell them; and I won’t go without letting you know. I promise. Now go to sleep.”
She laid her hand on his forehead, but, for a little while, he heard her breathing deeply and quickly and the sense of his blundering stayed with him so that sleep was longer in coming.
All the same he was much better next day. He was able to sit up and had the glory and excitement of a chop for his midday dinner. And when the pleasant hour of tea arrived it was Adrienne herself who came in carrying the little tray.
He had not seen her in daylight before and his first feeling was one of alarm, for, if she were afoot like this, in daylight, must it not mean that she was soon to leave the hospital? He felt shy of her, too, for, altered as she was by night, the day showed her as far more altered. Whether she seemed much older or much younger he could not have said. The coiffe, covering her forehead, and bound under her chin in a way peculiar to her, left only, as it were, the means of expression visible.
She sat down by the window and looked out, glancing round from time to time as he drank his tea and it was she who found the calm little sentences, about the latest news from the front, the crashing of Bulgaria, that carried them on until he had finished. When he had pushed down his tray she turned her chair and faced him, folding her hands together on her white apron, and she said, and he knew that she had come to say it, “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
He had had, while she sat at the window, her profile with the jutting nose, and her face, as it turned upon him now, made him think suddenly of a seagull. Questing, lonely, with vigilant eyes, it seemed to have great spaces before it; to be flying forth into empty spaces and to an unseen goal.