“What I say is,” her husband protested sullenly, “that we ought to wait for the doctor’s orders. I’m against seeing a poor body like that jolted across the country in an open motor-car, in his state. I’m not sure that it’s for his good.”
“And what business is it of yours, I should like to know?” the woman demanded sharply. “You get up-stairs and begin moving the furniture from where the rain’s coming sopping in. And if so be you can remember while you do it that this is a judgment that’s come upon us, why, so much the better. We are evil-doers, all of us, though them as likes the easy ways generally manage to forget it.”
The man retreated silently. The woman sat down upon a stool and waited. Gerald sat opposite to her, the battered dressing-case upon his knees. Between them was stretched the body of the unconscious man.
“Are you used to prayer, young sir?” the woman asked.
Gerald shook his head, and the woman did not pursue the subject. Only once her eyes were half closed and her words drifted across the room.
“The Lord have mercy on this man, a sinner!”
CHAPTER IV
“My advice to you, sir, is to chuck it!”
Gerald turned towards the chauffeur by whose side he was seated a little stiffly, for his limbs were numbed with the cold and exhaustion. The morning had broken with a grey and uncertain light. A vaporous veil of mist seemed to have taken the place of the darkness. Even from the top of the hill where the car had come to a standstill, there was little to be seen.