There had been a rush to help, and he had actually shoved Streatley away with a vicious intention of really hurting him, so unendurable had it been to him to think of those great hairy hands, besmirched by a hundred love affairs, touching the child; and it was he who had picked her up and carried her upstairs, followed by Laura, and laid her on her bed.
‘I’m ashamed of you,’ he had said to Laura under his breath as he turned and walked out of the room, shocked at such brutal exploiting of an exhausted child.
‘But so am I, so am I——’ Laura had answered distractedly, running to the bell and frantically ringing for her maid; and Sally lay on the bed like a folded flower, thought Charles, stirred by passion into poetic images, and at least for the moment safe in unconsciousness from the screaming, tearing, grabbing world.
The next morning, then, when Laura came down punctually at nine o’clock to breakfast—for however late she went to bed her restless vitality, once it was broad daylight, prevented her being able to stay there, which made her unpopular in country houses,—she found Charles in the dining-room, standing with his back to the fire.
‘How much you must love me,’ she remarked sarcastically, being, after a bad night, a little cross.
‘I don’t love you at all at this moment,’ said Charles.
‘Then is it breakfast you want?’
‘No,’ said Charles.
‘Can it be Sally?’