Then, just as she strolled out to have her coffee outside in the sun, something further crunched the gravel. Again it was the bicycle of a telegraph-boy, and she took the telegram herself from his hand, at the front door, feeling certain now, after her experiences of false alarm in the morning, that it was for her. But again was wrong; it was for Hugh. So she put it on the hall-table inside, and merely waited for him to come up from the river. But it was a foreign telegram.
Peggy sat down and drank her coffee, wondering what had so upset her. True she had fallen into the river, and lost a trout in consequence, and got very wet, but some sense of calamity was over her. Then suddenly she was immensely reassured, for the figures of Hugh and Daisy appeared coming up the steep bank from the water-meadow.
“Oh, mummy, three fish,” shrieked Daisy, “and one is bigger than you ever saw. I did the landing-net.”
But Hugh, too, was grave.
“Is there a letter from Edith?” he asked.
“No. Another telegram has just come for you. I didn’t send it down, because I expected you to come immediately.”
Hugh paused beside her.
“Three fish,” he said; “isn’t that big one a beauty? Peggy, why is she busy?”
He met her eyes; he saw the causeless trouble in her face.
“It’s on the hall table,” she said.