“Never mind,” Kate said briskly, “a few extra things won’t be in the way. Now see here, Hugh, go in and shave, I’ll bring your hot water, then dress, your brown suit and your new Panama—I wonder where your travelling cap is? No need to get flurried, you can have twenty minutes to dress and then take a comfortable half-hour for lunch. Larkin’s here, luckily; I can send him for a wagonette, so you won’t have to waste time walking to the station.”
Hugh felt his chin.
“I suppose I must shave? I shouldn’t meet any one by this train.” He looked at her anxiously for indulgence.
“Certainly you must,” she said severely, and then he knew there was no hope.
“Do you want any of this with you?” she added, nodding across to his paper-strewn table, “or shall I put it all in a safe place till you come back?”
“Oh, by Jove,” he said,—“yes, there’s that short story of mine, ‘Fools of Fortune’—I’ve promised that for the Melbourne Review, it ought to have been posted last night. And then there’s that woman’s stuff—I [p202] suppose there’s no time for me to run across to Miss Bibby, eh, K?”
“Certainly there is not,” said Kate decisively, “you don’t stir from here without a comfortable lunch.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “see here, K, I’ll leave her stuff here on the desk in this envelope, and you take it over to her and tell her I think if she goes more on these lines the tale will be stronger.”
“All right,” said Kate, “and what about the other tale,—the one for the Melbourne Review?”
Hugh hastily stuffed some more MS into an envelope, wrote a few lines to accompany it, and scribbled an address.