Edwin, secretly agitated, said in a curious light tone:
"If you ask me, he kept it quiet just to pay us out."
"Pay you out? What for?"
"For making him wear spectacles at all. These kids want a deuce of a lot of understanding; but that's my contribution. He simply said to himself: 'Well, if they think they're going to cure my eyesight for me with their beastly specs they just aren't, and I won't tell 'em!'"
"Edwin!" Hilda protested warmly. "I wonder you can talk like that!"
Tertius Ingpen went off into one of his peculiar long fits of laughter; and Edwin quizzically smiled, feeling as if he was repaying Hilda for her unnecessary insistence upon the fact that he was responsible for the choosing of an optician. Hilda, suspecting that the two men saw something droll which was hidden from her, blushed and then laughed in turn, somewhat self-consciously.
"Don't you think it's best to go to London, about an affair like eyesight?" she asked Ingpen pointedly.
"The chief thing in these cases," said Ingpen solemnly, "is to satisfy the maternal instinct. Yes, I should certainly go to London. If Teddie disagrees, I'm against him. Who are you going to?"
"You are horrid!" Hilda exclaimed, and added with positiveness: "I shall ask Charlie Orgreave first. He'll tell me the best man."
"You seem to have a great belief in Charlie," said Ingpen.