“Dearest Tony, You don’t want to drive me away, I suppose? Because I don’t intend to go. When am I to see you? I hope you aren’t unwell? Yours ever, BEVIS.”
The answer was brought with the smallest delay.
“Dearest Bevis, I’m not ill, only so dreadfully tired. Cicely will give you your tea and dine with you. I will see you to-morrow. Yours ever, TONY.”
This consoled him much, though not altogether. And the handwriting puzzled him. He had never seen Tony write like that before. He could infer from the slant of the letters that she had written in bed; but it was in a hand cramped and controlled, as though with surely unnecessary thought and effort.
He was horridly lonely all the afternoon.
Tea was brought into the library and with it came Miss Latimer. She wore rain-dashed tweeds and under her battered black felt hat her hair was beaded with rain. At once he saw that she was altered. It was not that she was more pale than usual; less pale, indeed, for she had a spot of colour on each cheek, but, as if her being had gathered itself together, for some emergency, about its irreducible core of flame, she showed, to his new perception of her, an aspect at once ashen and feverish; and even though in her entrance she was composed, if that were possible, beyond her wont, his subtle sense of change detected in her self-mastery something desperate and distraught.
She did not look at him as she went to the tea-table, drawing off her wet gloves. The table had been placed before the fire, and Bevis, who had risen on her entrance, dropped again into his seat, the capacious leather divan set at right angles to the hearth, its back to the window. Miss Latimer, thus, facing him across the table as she measured out the tea, was illuminated by such dying light as the sombre evening still afforded.
They had murmured a conventional greeting and he now asked her if she’d been out walking in this bad weather. It was some relief to see that she had not been with Tony the whole day through.
“Only down to the village,” she said. “There is a woman ill there.”
He went on politely to enquire if she weren’t very wet and would not rather change before tea—he wouldn’t mind waiting a bit; but she said, seating herself and pouring on the boiling water, that she was used to being wet and did not notice it.