“Oh, don’t look so woebegone Jack,” his wife had said; “you’ll see me again before long.”
Then the fussy little mountain engine squeaked, as a puppy squeaks when its toe is trodden on, and we puffed our way up the pass.
London was in its usual desperate February plight, when we got back, full of fogs and still-born frosts that seemed to produce a cold far more bitter than the piercing temperature of those sunny altitudes from which we had come. We both, I think, felt rather lonely, and even before we had got to our journey’s end we had settled that for the present it was ridiculous that we should keep open two houses when one would suffice, and would also be far more cheerful for us both. So, as we both lived in almost identical houses in the same street in Chelsea, we decided to “toss,” live in the house which the coin indicated (heads mine, tails his) share expenses, attempt to let the other house, and, if successful, share the proceeds. A French five-franc piece of the second empire told us it was “heads.”
We had been back some ten days, receiving every day the most excellent accounts from Davos, when, first on him, then on me, there descended like some tropical storm, a feeling of indefinable fear. Very possibly this sense of apprehension (for there is nothing in the world so virulently infectious) reached me through him: on the other hand both these attacks of vague foreboding may have come from the same source. But it is true that it did not attack me till he spoke of it, so the possibility perhaps inclines to my having caught it from him. He spoke of it first, I remember, one evening when we had met for a good-night talk, after having come back from separate houses where we had dined.
“I have felt most awfully down all day,” he said; “and just after receiving this splendid account from Daisy, I can’t think what is the matter.”
He poured himself out some whisky and soda as he spoke.
“Oh, touch of liver,” I said. “I shouldn’t drink that if I were you. Give it me instead.”
“I was never better in my life,” he said.
I was opening letters, as we talked, and came across one from the house agent, which, with trembling eagerness I read.
“Hurrah,” I cried, “offer of five guᵃˢ—why can’t he write it in proper English—five guineas a week till Easter for number 31. We shall roll in guineas!”