He thought of that helpless figure with scarred shoulders that he had laid on the bed, but he did not wince. His voice, as he asked her about the trouble at Government House, was so kind and sympathetic, that it came to nearer making her break down than all that had gone before.
“I was very much frightened,” she said. “Though Mr. Gregory says that there was no danger. He cleared the stoep with a shambok—that was all!” She tried to smile, and her eyes were rather misty.
“You look as if you had had about enough of it!” he said, unconscious of the effect of the morning sunlight on his own face. He wished too that she had not, with her few words, drawn him a picture of Gregory and the shambok—it reminded him of his own action this morning. Men like himself and Gregory—men proud of their masculine quality of strength—seemed of a brutal type to him just now.
“I feel rather as if I had been to three balls all at once, and danced into daylight—that is all. Dissipation always gives me the same cheap feeling as a great strain. Mrs. Stern is coming home to breakfast with me to cheer me up, she is leaving in the mail this afternoon, unfortunately, or I should try and persuade her to stay for a few days.”
“I hear there is another cruiser signalled at Port Albert,” said Mrs. Ritchie, as she turned from Arthur White, to whom she had been talking. “The Skate I think it must be—I suppose you all know Captain Tullock? The bay will be quite lively this afternoon with our departure and his arrival. I shall see your wife then, of course, Major Churton?”
“She is seedy this morning, but she may feel well enough to come down,” he said composedly. “Good-bye, Mrs. Lewin, take care of yourself.”
She wondered why he was so particularly kind to her, and if he would have been could he only have known all the inward workings of her heart! Life would be a little humiliating were it not for its power of secrecy. As Bute Churton’s big figure disappeared along the narrow street to the town, Leoline looked after him and guessed nothing of the irony of their relations with each other, for he was thinking that worthless fellows like Lewin were blessed with wives like this, while she shrank from a consciousness of thoughts disloyal to her husband.
“Major Churton looks very ill!” she said. “I never noticed it before; but I am sure he ought to get away. I have grown selfish with my own concerns.”
“He looks as if he had had some kind of shock,” said Mrs. Ritchie, with her fatal intuition. “I wonder what made him late!”