“It’s very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his competition is after all of very little account compared with other things—his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking horribly used up.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the room at Darrow’s side.
“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend who was used up.”
Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour, to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His rooms, according to Dick’s report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs, and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his profession, he seemed to have no personal life.
Miss Verney’s companion having presently advised her of the lapse of time, there ensued a general leave-taking, at the close of which Dick accompanied the ladies to their carriage. Darrow was meanwhile blundering into his greatcoat, a process which always threw him into a state of perspiring embarrassment; but Mrs. Peyton, surprising him in the act, suggested that he should defer it and give her a few moments’ talk.
“Let me make you some fresh tea,” she said, as Darrow blushingly shed the garment, “and when Dick comes back we’ll all walk home together. I’ve not had a chance to say two words to you this winter.”
Darrow sank into a chair at her side and nervously contemplated his boots. “I’ve been tremendously hard at work,” he said.
“I know: too hard at work, I’m afraid. Dick tells me you have been wearing yourself out over your competition plans.”
“Oh, well, I shall have time to rest now,” he returned. “I put the last stroke to them this morning.”
Mrs. Peyton gave him a quick look. “You’re ahead of Dick, then.”