The anger was quite gone now, and it was a tremulous hand that Dora laid on his shoulder.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “thank you! I am so sorry for you, you know, and I’m grateful. I shall go back and tell Claude I know, and—and thank him, and be sorry.”
“Yes, that is the best thing you can do,” said Jim.
Claude was alone in their sitting room when she got back, and, as he always did, he rose from his chair as she entered. For a moment she stood looking at him, mute, beseeching. Then she came to him.
“Thank you about Jim, dear,” she said. “He has just told me about it, to make me—make me see what you were. Oh, Claude, I didn’t know.”
And then the tears came. But his arm was around her, and her head lay on his shoulder.
CHAPTER XII.
UNCLE ALF was seated with Dora on the terrace at Grote one afternoon late in August. Dora herself was hatless and cloakless, for it was a day of windless and summer heat, but Uncle Alf had an overcoat on, and a very shabby old gray shawl in addition cast about his shoulders. His face wore an expression of ludicrous malevolence.
“And I had to come out here, my dear, and take refuge with you,” he said, “for Maria will drive me off my head with talk of that tumour of hers. Why, she speaks as if nobody had ever had a tumour before. I said to her, ‘Maria, if it had been cancer now, and you’d got over as you have, it might have been something to make a tale of.’ But tumour, God bless me! and benignant, so Sir Henry said, at that.”
Dora gave a little shriek of laughter.