“My darling,” he said, “you are so sweet with me. If I have to criticise anything you do, you never take it amiss. And now I’ll tell you another reason why I think we had better go, apart from the comfort and convenience of it. It is that I don’t think the mater is very strong, for all that she eats so heartily. She gets very easily tired, and she’s laid down a programme for the next six weeks which might well knock anybody out. Now it would be awfully good of you if you would help her with it.”
That appealed to Dora much more.
“Oh, then, let’s go, let’s go,” she said. “Telephone at once. No, I think I will. I think Dad would like me to.”
“You think of everything,” he said. “I hoped you would think of that. He’ll be so pleased at your telephoning. ‘8003 Lewes,’ you know.”
Claude had a meeting at Brentwood that afternoon and had to leave immediately, taking a cab to the station and the train from there, so that Dora might use the motor if she wished. He felt that this was a perfectly natural and ordinary thing to do, but at the same time he had to tell her he had done it.
“It takes but a very little longer,” he said in answer to her urging him to take the motor himself, “and a walk from the station at the other end will do me good. I wish I was going to prowl about with you all afternoon. But men must work, you know. Though when I come back I hope I shan’t find that you’ve been weeping. But you wouldn’t like your ‘Claudius Imperator’ to be a drone. Good-bye, my darling; I shall be back in time to dine and take you to the play.”
He lingered a moment still.
“If you haven’t got anything special to do, you might go down to Richmond and have tea with Uncle Alf,” he said. “He’d like it, and you haven’t seen him for some time.”
“Yes, I’ll go by all means,” she said.
“Thanks, dear. You see, after all, he gives us fifteen thou. a year.”