"And it is just as well," she continued, with a bitter little laugh, "that there isn't, for it's a deadly, dreary time--"
"All times are dreary," assented the tall man in a low voice, rapidly, passionately, "when there is no one who cares--"
"There is my husband," she interrupted, this time with a nervous laugh. The answer fitted doubly, for she turned to a figure which at that moment came out of the soft rose-tinted light of the room within, and said in a faintly fretful tone, "You don't mean to say, George, surely, that you've been working till now?"
"Working!" echoed George Langford, absently. "Yes! why not? Ah! is that you, Campbell? Brought the missus home, like a good chap. Sorry I couldn't come, my dear; but there was a beastly report overdue, so now I've only time for a spin on the bicycle before dinner, for I must have some exercise. By the way, Laura, you'd better send off your home letter without mine. I really haven't had time to write to the boys this mail."
He was busy now, in the same absent, preoccupied, yet energetic way, in seeing to the machine, which a red-coated servant held for him; but he looked up quickly at his wife's reply--
"I haven't written either."
"Haven't you? That's a pity," he began, then paused, with a vaguely unquiet look at her and her tall companion, which merged, however, into a good-natured smile. "Well, they won't know it was Christmas mail anyhow. 'Pon my soul I'd forgotten it myself, Campbell, or I'd have made a point.... But there's the devil of a crush of work just now, though I shall clear some of the arrears off to-morrow. That's about the only good of a holiday to me!" He was off as he spoke--a shadow gliding into the shadows, where the red hands of the poinsettias and the white stars of the oleanders showed fainter as the dusk deepened.
But he left a pair of covetous, entreating hands and a white face behind him in the verandah, between the rosy light of comfort from within and the grey gloom of the world without.
"It cannot go on--this sort of thing--for ever," said the man, still in that low, passionate voice. "It will kill--"
"Kill him? Do you think so?" she interrupted, still with that little half-nervous, half-bitter laugh. "I don't; he's awfully strong and awfully clever, you know."