“Hush, darling! Who cares? You’ll get straight into bed, with a hot-water bottle at your poor cold feet, and I’ll make you a cup of beautiful coffee.”
She stopped short.
Margie, bringing back Paul, to find Gilbert like that. And she had told Margie to bring him. It was all her fault.
She looked at the clock; half past six. Margie was to be expected any minute now. Gilbert was sitting there in the kitchen in his wet clothes. He didn’t look very strong. And Nina! Nina was telling her about Mr. Doyle, and she pretended to pay attention, but she was listening for Margie’s home-coming now with as much anxiety as she had listened for Nina’s. This might spoil Margie’s poor little romance forever—and it was her fault. Gilbert would be ill.
She had just got Nina into bed when the screen door slammed in the next house.
“One instant, Nina!” she cried, and rushed out, down the steps, through the sodden little garden in the driving rain, and back into the Morgans’ kitchen. Gilbert still sat just as she had left him, his head on his arm.
“I’ll—lock him in!” she thought, desperately. “But I’ll have to tell Margie.”
She went into the little passage, closing the kitchen door behind her, and on into the sitting room. No one there. So she went toward the dining room. The doorway was blocked by a tremendous figure, standing there hat in hand, his back toward her.
“Oh, Bill!” she cried, in her immeasurable relief.
He turned; he saw her there, with her soft hair wet and disordered, her face so white; he had seen his dining table set out with his mother’s sacred possessions—and he showed no surprise. She thought that nothing would surprise him, nothing would shock him, that he would meet anything in his life coolly, honestly, and steadily—like a man.