“She has a cold, only a cold,” Henrietta said in a dead voice, and she went upstairs. Her mother was in bed, and Henrietta looked down at the thin, pretty face. “How ill are you?” she asked in a threatening manner. “Tell me how ill you are.”
“I’ve only got a cold, Henry dear. I shall be up to-morrow.”
“Promise you won’t be really ill.”
“Why should I be?”
“It’s Miss Stubb—saying things.”
“Women chatter,” Mrs. Mallett said. “If it’s not scandal, it’s an illness. You ought to know that.”
“They might leave you alone, anyway.”
“Yes, I wish they would,” Mrs. Mallett said faintly, and dropped back on her pillow.
Now, sitting in her father’s room, with her mother only a few weeks dead, she reproached herself for her readiness to be deceived, for her preoccupation with her own affairs and the odious Mr. Jenkins, for the exuberance of life which hid from her the dwindling of her mother’s, and the fact, now so plain, that when Reginald Mallett died his wife’s capacity for struggling was at an end. She had suffered bitterly from the sight of his deterioration and from her failure to prevent it. In his sulky, torturing presence she had desired his absence, but this permanent absence was more than she could bear. And all Henrietta could do was to obey her mother’s injunction to accept help from her aunts, but she had refused the offer of an escort to Radstowe and Nelson Lodge; she would have no highly respectable servant sniffing at the boarding-house—and she would have been bound to sniff in that permanently scented atmosphere—which was, after all, her home. She left with genuine regret, with tears.
“You mustn’t cry, dearie,” Mrs. Banks said, holding Henrietta to the bosom of her greasy dress. “It’s a lucky thing for you.”