‘He’s my husband,’ said the little lady, flushing a very bright scarlet.
Well; what a surprise. Mr. Jerrold was really most surprised. Not that the lady wasn’t, he was sure, a most agreeable wife for any man to have, but that the young man seemed so very young to have one at all; and if at all she ought, to match him, be a mere slip of a girl,—somebody about Billy’s age.
Yes; it was a surprise. Mr. Jerrold didn’t quite know what to say.
‘In that case——’ he began.
But really he hadn’t an idea what to say, and stood in the middle of the road staring down at the little lady through his monocle—he wore a monocle—and she stared back at him, while the flush slowly ebbed away out of her face.
III
Her nephew. So that was what Christopher seemed to be to this impartial stranger. It gave Catherine more than a shock, it made her heart feel as if it stood still. And his surprise, his humiliating surprise, when she said Christopher was her husband, and her own discomfort when she told him....
Was it so much marked, then, the difference between them? It hadn’t been in London. Why, in London before they married they had often stood arm in arm in front of a glass and laughed to see how no one would guess, really no one could possibly guess, that they were not very nearly of an age. Besides what about all those bus-conductors and people calling her Miss? One of them had even called her Missie—‘Take care, now, Missie,’ he had said, catching her by the arm, ‘don’t you go jumping off before we’re stopped and breaking your neck and getting us into trouble with your young man’—but he, she was afraid, had been drinking. It must be because she was so tired now always that she looked older. To-day she was tired, yesterday she had been tired—oh, but so tired, so tired.
She stared up at Mr. Jerrold, while the flush faded out of her face, and thought how dreadful it was going to be if every time she was tired people took her for Christopher’s aunt. What a humiliation. And inevitably sooner or later he would notice it himself, and hear it too from strangers, just as she was hearing it from this stranger.
‘Let us sit down,’ said Mr. Jerrold sensibly, ‘and wait for them to come back.’