“I will be at Davos in a fortnight from to-day,” she said. “That is reasonable, is it not?”
“Yes, if you will be an outdoor invalid in the interval,” he said.
Edith was silent, wondering at herself for the perfect calmness which she felt. At first she thought that the suddenness of the news might have partly stunned her, but the minutes were passing, and still she had no consciousness of having received a shock. She understood, too, the gravity of the sentence which had been pronounced; it was not that her mind refused to grasp it. Now she almost laughed.
“I feel I ought to apologise for being so unagitated,” she said, “but I don’t feel the least inclined to be agitated. Perhaps I have been fearing this all these last days, and anyhow the fear is removed, now I know. Now about my plans; I will tell you.”
Edith hesitated again. She had known Sir Thomas from her childhood; he had done all that was possible for her late husband; he had brought her child into the world. She determined to ask him several things which concerned her, so it seemed, more intimately than her illness.
“Can you give me a quarter of an hour now?” she asked. “There are several questions I want to put to you. How dazzling this reflected sun is. Ah, I can sit out of the glare there!”
She moved her place so that she sat with her back to the light and covered her eyes with her hands.
“First, then, about my plans,” she said. “I will be at Davos in a fortnight, but I won’t promise to be an invalid in the interval. I mean to go with my husband to Munich for ten days and hear Wagner opera. We had planned it all, you see, and we shall start in two days. From there I will go to Davos.”
“Ah, I protest against that!” said Sir Thomas. “It means fatigue, excitement, bad air, the three things you must avoid. I will speak to Mr. Grainger myself.”
“No, indeed, you must not,” said she. “It must be I who tell him. Now, I don’t mean to tell him until after we have seen the opera together. Oh, Sir Thomas, I can’t. I simply can’t start my invalid life without one more treat, as the children say, without one more week of Indian summer. After that, I promise to tell him, and I promise to be the most willing and obedient of patients. It does mean such a lot to me! I can’t tell you how much. I shall fret and worry over not having gone there with him if I don’t go. But I intend to. So please tell me how to minimise any harm it may do me.”