“What’s not my fault?” she asked.
“That he’s better!”
With that, they moved to be upon their way, still uproarious, still clutching each other; and as they went they looked back to shout at her.
“He won’t get better very fast, will he, Lily?” one of them thus called back to her, and, without pausing, replied to herself: “Not if you have your way!”
And the other: “Eleanor Gray and Harriet Joyce have nothing on you, have they, Lily?”
They disappeared round a curving path, leaning upon each other from exhaustion; and Lily stood looking after them frowningly. There had been little good-nature in their raillery, and also there were mysterious and vaguely unpleasant implications in it—particularly in the final jibe about Eleanor Gray and Harriet Joyce. Miss Gray was the girl accused by rumour of having sought to put herself upon James Herbert McArdle’s train, and Miss Joyce was widely supposed to have fainted with the deliberate purpose of attracting his attention. The implication of the mirthful pair just encountered that Lily surpassed both Miss Gray and Miss Joyce was plain enough—as if going to a hospital to read to a patient were a mere manœuvre of the type to which the Gray and Joyce manœuvres belonged! And as if one wouldn’t gladly give a little of one’s time to a hospital patient who has become a patient through one’s own fault! But more than mere rallying upon the hospital readings seemed to have been implied; and as Lily thought the matter over, she felt that something of the teasing pair’s meaning evaded her.
She had the same feeling after an interview the next day with one of her nearest and dearest girl friends, who came to see her at home. “I don’t want to be intrusive, dear,” the caller informed her, with sympathetic but rather eager gravity. “You know me too well to believe I’d ask such a thing out of pure curiosity; but I’ve simply got to know how poor Henry Burnett is taking it.”
“Taking what, Emma?”
“Lily! You know what I mean. I mean all this about you and Mr. McArdle.”
“ ‘All this’?” Lily repeated in a tone of cold inquiry. “I don’t see that such a simple matter needs quite that sort of definition. Naturally, I’m doing what I can to help him through his convalescence. Oughtn’t I to? But perhaps you don’t know that I’m responsible for his being in the hospital, Emma.”