“It means an age without seeing you. Elsie, can I write to you?”
“Yes ... no....” She was startled. “Oh, Les, darling, I’d love your letters!... But he’d see them. Wait a minute.”
She thought rapidly.
“Address them to the post-office—I’ll call there. He doesn’t know or care what I do all day, so long as I’m always there in the evenings when he gets back.”
But Elsie was to find herself mistaken. Her husband, after their return to the suburban villa, displayed a very unmistakable interest in her movements during the hours of his absence at work.
He obliged her to give him an account of her day, and took to ringing her up on the telephone for no acknowledged reason, and always at a different hour.
At first, Elsie cared little. She and Leslie Morrison met daily, and on one occasion spent the afternoon in the country together. Elsie recklessly telephoned to her own house at seven o’clock that evening, and said that she was with Irene Tidmarsh, and should not come home that night.
“You must,” said the hollow voice at the other end of the line.
“I can’t. Her father’s awfully ill, and she’s afraid of being left.”
“When shall you be home?”