“Won’t you like to go there again this afternoon?” she said. “Since the ice has gone there is really nowhere else for you to go. Do send Ferris up with the tea-basket. You can have tea there.”
Yet—how she tried, but how miserable she was! She knew, too, after her interview with the doctor this morning, why she found it all so difficult. But she did not want Hugh to know just yet. She would bear it alone for a little, though it was just this bearing it alone that was so hard. But she did so want him to have a few days more without this extra burden.
“Yes, do let us have tea there,” he said. “I should love to show you the place. Do come; it will be splendid if you will come.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t really feel up to it to-day,” she said.
“Oh, I am sorry!” said Hugh. “Poor darling.”
Edith gave a little impatient click with her tongue.
“Oh! how often have I told you that I can bear anything but pity,” she said.
They had finished lunch, and she got up as she spoke and stepped out on to the balcony where she usually lay. On her way she passed close by the back of Hugh’s chair, and longed—how she longed—to take that dear head in her arms, and just say, “Oh, don’t you understand, don’t you understand?” But she could not; just at this moment she could not raise her head above the bitter salt wave of misery that smothered and choked her.
Hugh sat a few moments longer at the table, finishing his cigarette. Perhaps it was that the reaction from that little dream he had had on the hillside that morning, which gave him such comfort, such consolation, had come; perhaps his instinct told him that there was some fresh disaster which he did not yet know; perhaps this was only the last straw, the little infinitesimal thing that made all the rest unbearable. Anyhow, as Edith went out, he felt his heart sink where it had never sunk before, into an abyss of misery down which he could not bear to look. He knew—that was the worst part of it almost—how horribly ill, how wretched, how weak Edith must be feeling to speak to him like that.