Forded handed in his telegram, together with a still more laconically worded one to his father, and the doctor solaced himself with a small retaliation.
He wrote out a lengthy telegram, pushed it across the counter without showing it to Ford, and only remarked, as they left the office:
“I know my sister will want to know what’s happened, and I have not your scruples in regard to clichés in the present case.”
Lucian never forgot that afternoon’s journey to London. Cecil, dazed and white and speechless, sat in a corner seat of the railway carriage, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, his eyes, with the look in them that the doctor had most dreaded to see there, fixed vacantly on space.
Rose, who looked utterly tired out, seemed unable to sit still and moved restlessly in her seat, first opening the window and then shutting it, shifting her dressing-bag from one place to another, and occasionally pulling articles down from the rack apparently for the mere purpose of replacing them.
No one spoke, but the atmosphere was charged with misery until the very air seemed to rock with it, and beneath all, the doctor, at least, was acutely conscious of the steady, relentless undercurrent of cold, passionless hostility and contempt that was soundlessly sent forth by Ford Aviolet. He thought that Rose, too, was aware of it.
At the terminus it was raining, and very cold. Cecil’s teeth were chattering. It seemed the crowning touch to the utter forlornness encompassing him.
“A bag is missing,” said Ford. “Mine, of course. It’s of no account, but I shall have to make the usual fuss. Curse these fellows.”
His face was livid, and he looked angrier than Lucian had ever seen him.
“We’d better go on,” said Rose drearily.