“It was yesterday, after tea. No—let me see—it was before tea, to be absolutely accurate. In the garden.”
She knew perfectly well that he was lying, but she asked herself whether Cecil knew it.
Before he went back to school for his last term there, Diana Aviolet came to stay at Squires without her husband. She looked pale and drawn, and the slim lines of her figure were sharpening into a middle-aged angularity.
“Cecil has improved a lot,” she said to Rose, soon after her arrival. “He takes so much more interest in things—seems so much keener, somehow.”
“I think he’s very well,” said Rose coolly. “Last year he was growing too fast.”
“I daresay he was. You’re lucky, Rose, to have a son.”
Rose softened in an instant. “Poor Di! It’s rotten bad luck. Have you been to a doctor to see if anything can be done?”
“Oh, my dear!” Diana coloured faintly and prudishly.
“Well, it might be worth while. They have all sorts of dodges now-a-days, I believe. There was a woman I knew—at least I only saw her about once, but she’s a friend of Uncle A.’s—well, she’d been married sixteen years and never a sign of a baby, and she wanted one most dreadfully. And at last she went to a doctor, and made her husband go as well, and he told them——”
Diana broke in hurriedly, “Please, Rose, I’d really rather you didn’t.”