“Only that the circumstances are a little altered. I was looking on you as a young woman without—well, without a reputation to lose; in which case it wouldn’t matter a rap that you should sleep in this bed and I on the sofa over there in the same room. As it is, of course——!”
Laura raised herself discreetly on an elbow and thumped a hard pillow into a semblance of softness. “Yes?” she said almost nonchalantly.
“Well, I mean,” Mr. Priestley amplified, a little uncomfortably, “we don’t want to add divorce to our other crimes, do we?”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Laura said brightly. “I’m not really married. I only said that because I thought it would make you readier to help me. Look, there’s no mark even of a wedding-ring.”
She extended her left hand and Mr. Priestley, in order to examine it the better, held its slim fingers in his. When he put it down on the bed again he continued to hold its slim fingers. Mr. Priestley was a very absent-minded man.
But he was not a man of the world. A man of the world would instantly have said all the pretty things which this new piece of information should require. Mr. Priestley only said, rather blankly; “But don’t you see, that’s almost worse. You’d be hopelessly compromised. Of course I shall spend the night in the kitchen.” He looked a little wistfully at the sofa near the fire. It was not the most comfortable sofa ever made, but compared with a Windsor chair in the kitchen it was Heaven.
“On a hard chair, in a draught?” Laura smiled lazily. Her cheeks were a little flushed, for the honest elderberry wine was hard at work now making the place hot for influenza germs, and her whole body was permeated with a pleasant warmth. She tried to put herself in Mr. Priestley’s place and face a hard chair in a draughty kitchen. “It seems to me I’m compromised quite deeply as it is. After all we’re supposed to be married, you know. By the way, is that the door-key?” She disengaged her fingers from Mr. Priestley’s and extended them invitingly.
Mr. Priestley put the key into them.
Laura weighed it pensively in her hand. “You’re very conventional, aren’t you?” she asked.
Mr. Priestley, who was under the impression that he had just killed one of his fellow-men and was not in the least sorry for it, nodded. “In some circumstances,” he said primly, “one has to be.”