“Yes, he’s got over his scratch, and the new coachman does you credit, Grim. He has decent ideas about a check rein. Order the horses for me at three. Dr. Morton says it will not hurt Mr. Stanwood to go for a short drive.”
Miss Frink hurried out of the room, and the two she left in it stared at each other. Adèle smothered a laugh behind a pretty hand, but the secretary had forgotten her smooth diplomacy in his annoyance.
“I wonder if she is going with him. The nurse is quite enough,” he said, as if to himself.
“I wish she’d ask me to go,” said Adèle. “I haven’t had a glimpse of him since I saw him lifted out of the road.”
“Nor she, much,” said Grimshaw. “She has had the nurse make frequent reports, but she hasn’t been in the sick-room at all. Why should she be bothered?”
“No reason, of course. She is not exactly a mush of love and sympathy. What I was really going to say, Leonard, was that I don’t see how a young attractive man like you entombs himself away from his kind the way you do, and must have done for years.”
Grimshaw raised his eyebrows as one accepting his due, and brushed back his thin crest of hair, with a careless hand.
“I work pretty hard,” he said.
Adèle looked apprehensively toward the door, then back at him.
“Is it always like this?” she breathed in a hushed voice.