"You do wish I could come?"
"Must I say?" smiled Mrs. Dennison. "For shame, Harry! You might be on your honeymoon."
He moved away, and flung himself into a chair.
"I don't think it's fair of Ruston," he broke out, "to run away and leave it all to me."
"Why, you told him you could do it perfectly! I heard you say so."
"How could I say anything else, when—when——"
"And originally you were both to be away! After all, you're not stopping because of Omofaga, but because Sir George has got the gout."
Harry Dennison, convicted of folly, had no answer, though he was hurt that he should be convicted out of his wife's mouth. He shuffled his feet about and began to whistle dolefully.
Mrs. Dennison looked at him with smothered impatience. Their little boy behaved like that when he was in a naughty mood—when he wanted the moon, or something of that kind, and thought mother and nurse cruel because it didn't come. Mrs. Dennison forgot that mother and nurse were fate to her little boy, or she might have sympathised with his naughty moods a little better.
She rose now and walked slowly over to her husband. She had a hand on his chair, and was about to speak, when he stopped his whistling and jerked out abruptly,