"Yes," said Katharine, smiling back at him frankly. "They have mended the gap in the hedge."
"The devil they have!" cried Ted. "We'll have it broken open again at once, won't we? Why didn't you stop them? You knew I wasn't there to tell them myself. Just like their confounded impertinence!"
"Hush," interrupted Katharine. "You mustn't get excited, old man; it isn't good for you."
She smoothed his pillows and arranged his coverlet with nervous rapidity, and Ted, submitting happily to her services, wondered innocently what she was blushing about. But he did not trouble himself to find out.
"I am beastly glad I poisoned myself," he murmured, with lazy satisfaction.
She was glad of the diversion when the Rector arrived at last, and she was allowed to escape into the next room.
"Well, my boy, and how has the world gone with you?" she heard her father say in his genial tones.
"It's a beastly jolly world, and I'm the jolliest brute in it," was Ted's reply.
They took rooms in the next street, and came in every day to look after him; and when neither the conscience of the "snide" doctor, nor the desire of the invalid to be nursed proved sufficient to preserve the farce of his illness any longer, they still lingered on under pretence of being wanted, and sent carefully worded letters to Miss Esther from which she was forced to conclude that their presence in town was urgently required, much as they would have wished it otherwise. What really happened was, that Ted and Katharine regularly conducted the old Rector to the British Museum every morning, and passed the day alone together until it was time to fetch him away again in the afternoon. And in the evenings they initiated him into the joys of a music hall, or introduced him to a new comedian; and the Rector was happier than he had ever been since the well-remembered days in Paris. As for Katharine, her feelings defied her own powers of description; she only knew that she had the sensation of waking up from a long, bad dream. Perhaps Ted felt the same. "You've cured the biggest hump I ever had in my life," was the way he expressed it.
Looking back on the even tenor of those few weeks, afterwards, Katharine was at a loss to remember what she had talked about to Ted in the many hours they had spent together. Perhaps they had not talked at all; at the time it never seemed to matter whether they did or not; at all events, their conversation usually lacked the personal element that alone makes conversation distinctive. There was nothing surprising to Katharine in this: as long as she could remember Ted had been the one person in the world to whom it was impossible to talk about one's self; and his sympathy for her was as completely superficial as her love for him was mainly protective.