There was silence a moment, then Edith spoke again.
“Now I shall sit out on my balcony all afternoon,” she said, “and hold this all in front of me, till I am quite certain that I fully realise it. And then, Peggy, this evening I will talk it over with you just once, and from then until—until the time that I am well again, we will never allude to it any more.”
“Yes, dear,” said she.
Then Edith’s face broadened into a great smile again.
“And, oh, what a beautiful laugh we had,” she said. “I can truly say in the future, if I am very much amused about something, ‘I haven’t laughed so much since they told me I had consumption.’”
“Don’t, don’t!” said Peggy.
Peggy, even in September, was full of business. There was a factory to be visited, a school of work to be inspected, and a “home” where surprise-descents were distinctly good for the matron, who was not wholly satisfactory, and it was not till after six that she got back to Rye House. But busy though she had been, it had required all her force and determination to get through her errands, for her mind kept flying back like a released spring to Edith, whom she had left sitting out in the warm autumn sunshine, facing what she had been told, adjusting, as she would have to do, her mind and her whole self to new conditions. When Peggy got back, they were to have their talk, just the one talk.
The hours had passed quickly for Edith, and if anyone had watched her, not knowing what occupied her mind so intensely, he would have said that here was a woman with a true gift of lotus-eating, so quietly she sat, so content to do nothing whatever. Once or twice only in those hours did anything of a disquieting nature seem to cross her mind, and even then a couple of sharp-drawn breaths, or a sudden look as of pain or fright in her eyes, soon past, was all the surface sign of it. And at the end, when she heard Peggy’s motor draw up at the door, it was with the same patient and smiling content, which for the most of the afternoon had lain like sunlight on her face, that she went downstairs.
The two had tea together in Peggy’s sitting-room, and then Edith took her favourite chair and spoke. Again there was no transition possible from the topics of the day which had occupied them at tea, and she began without preamble.
“Yes, dear, I have thought it all out,” she said, “and I know at this moment just how I feel about it, and what I hope I shall continue to feel. Peggy, it is so simple; big things always are, I think. Isn’t that a blessing? Now I shall begin at the beginning, not like Hugh’s stories, which begin in the middle, and go on till I get to the end, and then I shall stop. I don’t want you to say anything at all. It’s my innings.”