‘Look here, I must be off,’ he said, getting up firmly on Christopher’s showing a tendency, after quite a lot of whisky, to become too intimate in his talk for comfort. ‘This room’s pure George,’ he had been saying, ‘but Catherine’s bedroom—you should see Catherine’s bedroom——‘—was he going to offer to show it to him?
Lewes hurriedly got up and said he must be off.
‘You’re not crawling back into your shell already?’ cried Christopher, much flushed, and his hair, from his frequent passing his hand through it while he talked, much ruffled. ‘I’ll tell you what you are, Lucy—you’re nothing but a miserable whelk.’ And he laughed immoderately.
‘I’ve some work I must get finished to-night,’ said Lewes, taking no notice of this.
‘At two in the morning?’ exclaimed Christopher, laughing louder than ever. ‘That’s just the sort of thing you would do at two in the morning. Get married, old whelk—get married——’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You jolly well wouldn’t——’
‘Good night,’ interrupted Lewes abruptly.
But after he had gone Christopher soon recovered from the exuberance of whisky, and went very sadly to bed. He missed Catherine terribly. The flat was the loneliest place without her. And what if something had happened to her after all, in spite of Lewes’s cold-blooded assurances that nearly always nothing happens to anybody? He didn’t sleep much. He hated being alone in that dear room of happiness; and when at breakfast he got the telegram, as Lewes had foretold, saying she was coming by the first train, he determined to chuck the office and go and meet her.
Catherine, however, anxiously turning over every possibility, had thought that he might do this, and at Chickover station, eluding Stephen who was talking to a parishioner, sent a second telegram saying she wouldn’t be back till dinner. Her one desire was to keep out of Christopher’s sight till she had been to Maria Rome. Impossible to let him see her in the state she was in. Well did she know that this was being a slave, a silly slave, and that it was cruel to leave him all day wondering what was happening, but she was a slave, and this cruelty was nothing to the cruelty to them both of letting him meet her and see what she now looked like really. So she sent the second telegram.
Naturally, Christopher was excessively perturbed when he got in. What in damnation had happened in that beastly Chickover? Never again should she go there without him. Never again should she go a step without him. And she hadn’t taken any luggage with her, and she would be worn out. Blast Stephen. Blast that girl. And probably the bird-faced mother-in-law had had a hand in all this too. If so, let her be specially and thoroughly blasted.
He looked up the trains, and found that one arrived at 5.30, and there was no other till after ten. The 5.30 must be the one, then. He told Mrs. Mitcham, who had shown every symptom of astonishment and uneasiness on getting to the flat that morning and finding her mistress hadn’t returned, to have dinner ready earlier than usual, because Mrs. Monckton would be badly needing food, and then he went to his office after all, intending to go to Waterloo to meet the 5.30.