‘Mr. Luke! Rot? When it’s God’s Word I’m talkin’ about? Ain’t you my ’usband? Didn’t you vow——’
There was a tap at the door.
‘You see?’ said Jocelyn, starting and extraordinarily put out that Mrs. Luke should know he was in there. ‘You have disturbed my mother.’
‘What is it, Jocelyn?’ his mother’s voice asked anxiously from outside.
He opened the door. She too was in a dressing-gown, and her long hair hung down in thick plaits.
‘What is it, Jocelyn?’ she asked again.
‘Only that Sally has gone out of her senses,’ he said shortly; and he stalked away downstairs, ashamed to have been caught by his mother upstairs, angry with himself for being ashamed, and seriously enraged with Sally.
‘Salvatia, Jocelyn dearest—do remember,’ called Mrs. Luke plaintively after him.
‘Oh, Christ!’ muttered Jocelyn, banging the sitting-room door behind him and throwing himself on the hard narrow sofa from which, only a quarter of an hour before, he had got up, all warm with love, to go to his wife.
And in the room overhead Mrs. Luke put her arms round Sally, and did her best, while tactfully asking no questions, to soothe and calm the child. But how can one soothe and calm anything that behaves exactly as if it were a very rigid, unresponsive, and entirely dumb stone?