"You ought to go away, Lena, if only for two months. You look run down yourself."
"Yes, and I feel run down, too." Here she paused, took up her work for a moment, and put in two or three stitches. "I sometimes wonder——" she began, and said no more.
"What do you sometimes wonder?" he inquired.
"It is only when I lie awake at night, listening to the jackals—they always make me feel so desperately depressed, and when I am quite in the blues I cannot help asking myself what would become of Angel if—anything happened to me?"
"What a dismal idea, an odious little blue devil!" he exclaimed. "You should light a lamp and read some cheery novel; that would soon chase him away."
"And I might fall asleep, and set the bungalow on fire."
"Look here, Lena," he resumed, hitching his chair a little closer, "you know I'm pretty well off; no debts, no wife."
"Fancy naming them in the same breath!" she protested with a laugh.
"Well, sometimes one brings the other," and he nodded his head gaily; then, lowering his voice, he continued, "I daresay it is hard for Wilkinson to make both ends meet, with heavy insurances, and all that sort of thing"—Wilkinson was scrupulously saving and investing half of his pay—"so—so——" Then, with a sudden rush, "If you'll just run up to the hills for three months, and take Angel and the boys—I'll make it all right—you know I'm your cousin."
"Yes," she assented rather bitterly, "and the only Gascoigne who ever deigned to take the smallest notice of me; but it can't be done, Phil. You are a dear good fellow to suggest it, and if the matter lay with me I'd accept it like a shot and be off to-morrow; but Richard would not hear of it."