“Yes, Jim, I’m caught,” she said.
Then she put up her handkerchief to her mouth, and looked at it as she withdrew it again. There was a little stain on it, very bright red.
CHAPTER XIV
THERE was a big-ribbed looking-glass outside the window of the doctor’s consulting-room, that tilted in the warm, reddish sunlight of the September morning, while through the open sash there stole in the aromatic smell of fresh-laid asphalt. There was not much traffic going on, only occasionally the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs sounded staccato on the wooden pavement of Harley Street, and Edith could hear without effort all that Sir Thomas was saying.
He hardly led up to it, for she had come there that morning simply to know what the result of his examination had been, and he merely asked her a question or two as to her health since the birth of the baby. And then, without preparing her, for he knew that there is no breaking such news, he told her quite quietly, in a word or two.
Edith had been sitting opposite the window, looking at him with her pleasant, direct gaze, as if giving her very courteous attention to a story that did not particularly entertain her, but in which she was bound, for politeness’ sake, to appear interested. But when he finished she smiled at him as if his tale had had some slightly humorous conclusion. She did not feel in the least stunned, nor had she any consciousness of having received a shock. Only for a moment the little trivial circumstances of the hour and the place grew more vivid; she noticed that the clock on the chimney-piece had stopped, odd in the consulting-room of a great doctor; that Sir Thomas had a scar running across the back of his left hand; that one of her own gloves had fallen on to the floor. Then this attention to trivialities subsided again, and she felt perfectly normal, perfectly herself.
“Thank you for telling me so kindly and considerately,” she said. “You see how successful you have been, how little it has upset me? It is then—it is very serious.”
“Yes.”
Again she smiled at him.
“I quite understand,” she said.