‘Well, you are a brick,’ he said. ‘I shall be all right with something to read. But you’ve simply no idea how slow time goes when you’re in concealment. I can’t think how those Royalist chaps stood it as they did; and the Man in the Iron Mask and Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Queen Of.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Caroline again. ‘How long will it take to get an answer from India?’
‘Oh, weeks,’ said Rupert wearily. ‘I was just thinking I couldn’t stick it, and perhaps I’d better really run away to sea, only not Hastings, of course. But it doesn’t seem so bad now I’ve got the book, and Pincher’s rather jolly, and you too, of course,’ he added with sudden politeness.
‘Tell me all about last night.’ Caroline settled comfortably into a nest of straw. ‘What happened after we left you?’
‘Oh, William came and brought me in and gave me a rug and the dog and some more bread and cheese. And bread and bacon this morning.’
‘I say, you are hoarse.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. I say, don’t think me a pig, but I should like something to eat. I feel as if I’d been eating bread and cheese and cold bacon for long years, and it’s all fat—the bacon is, I mean.’
Caroline said how stupid it was of her and she’d bring him something when the men went home to their teas. And then suddenly there seemed to be nothing more to say.
There was a silence, broken by Rupert’s putting his head under the blanket to cough in a suppressed manner.
‘I hope you haven’t taken a chill,’ said Caroline with motherly anxiety. ‘Aunt Emmeline says you never take them if you keep your windows open at night; but of course you can’t here, because there aren’t any.’