“Aldebaran!” said Lucia, pointing inclusively to the spangled arch of the sky. “That bright one. Oh, Georgie, how restful it is to look at Aldebaran if one is worried and sad. It lifts one’s mind above petty cares and personal sorrows. The patens of bright gold! Wonderful Shakespeare! Look in to-morrow afternoon, won’t you, and tell me if there is any news. Naturally, I sha’n’t go out.”
“Oh, come and have lunch,” said Georgie.
“No, dear Georgie: the funeral is at two. Putney Vale. Buona notte.”
“Buona notte, dear Lucia,” he said.
Georgie hurried back to his house, and was disappointed to see that there were no lights in Daisy’s drawing-room nor in Robert Quantock’s study. But when he got up to his bedroom, where Foljambe had forgotten to pull down the blinds, he saw a light in Daisy’s bedroom. Even as he looked the curtains there were drawn back, and he saw her amply clad in a dressing-gown, opening windows at top and bottom, for just now the first principle of health consisted in sleeping in a gale. She too must have seen his room was lit, and his face at the window, for she made violent signs to him, and threw open the casement.
“Well?” she said.
“In Brompton Square,” said George. “And three thousand a year!”
CHAPTER II
THIS simple word “No” connoted a great deal in the Riseholme vernacular. It was used, of course, as a mere negative, without emphasis, and if you wanted to give weight to your negative you added “Certainly not.” But when you used the world “No” with emphasis, as Daisy had used it from her bedroom window to Georgie, it was not a negative at all, and its signification briefly put was “I never heard anything so marvellous, and it thrills me through and through. Please go on at once, and tell me a great deal more, and then let us talk it all over.”