He sat down on the stone bench for a little while and watched the fountain and listened to the chiff-chaff, while he lighted a cigarette and told himself that the day was pleasant. With reiteration the bird’s monotonous little utterance lost its special message for him and dropped to an accompaniment to thoughts that, if unhaunted, were not happy, in spite of the pleasant day. He felt that he hated silent, sunny Wyndwards. He cursed the impulse that had brought Antonia there, and him after her. It had seemed at the time the most natural of things that his young widowed friend should ask him to pay her a spring visit in her new home. His courtship of her, laconic, implicit, patient, had prolonged itself through the dreary London winter following the Armistice, and springtime on the moors had seemed full of promise to his hopes. Alas! why had they not stayed in safe, dear, dingy London, London of tubes and shops and theatres, of people and clever tea- and dinner-tables? There one lived sanely in the world of the normal consciousness, one’s personality hedged round by activity and convention from the vagrant and disintegrating influences of the subliminal, or the subconscious, whichever it might have been that had infernally played the trick of the other evening. He sat there, poking with his stick at the crevices between the flags, and the song of the chiff-chaff was his only comfort.
Miss Latimer did not return to lunch, and he was in the library waiting for Tony long before the appointed hour. She came before it struck, softly and suddenly entering, turning without a pause to close the door behind her, not looking at him as she went to the fire and leaned there, her hand upon the mantelpiece. She was dressed in black, a flowing gown with wide sleeves that invested her with an unfamiliar, invalided air; but her hair was beautifully wreathed and she wore her little high-heeled satin shoes, tying about the instep. For a moment she stood looking down into the fire; then, as she raised her face, he saw the change in her.
“Why, Tony,” he said gently, “you look very ill.”
Her eyes only met his for a moment and, instinctively, he kept the distance they measured.
“I’m not very well,” she said. “I haven’t been able to sleep. Not for these two nights.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Don’t take drugs,” he said after a moment. “Miss Latimer tells me that you take drugs. I didn’t know it.”
“It’s very seldom,” she said, with a faint, deprecatory smile. “I’m very careful.”
Still he felt that he could not approach her, and it was with a sense of the unmeet, or at all events the irrelevant, that he helplessly fell back on verbal intimacy. “You could, I am sure, sleep in the train to-night; with me to look after you.”