This kind of emotion was an unknown quantity to Lady Ingleby. So was the wild beating of her own heart. But she knew the situation called for tact, and was not tactful speech always her special forte?
“Jim,” she said, “are you not frightfully hungry? I should be; only I had an enormous tea before coming out. Would you like to hear what I had for tea? No. I am afraid it would make you feel worse. I suppose dinner at the inn was over, long ago. I wonder what variation of fried fish they had, and whether Miss Susannah choked over a fish-bone, and had to be requested to leave the room. Oh, do you remember that evening? You looked so dismayed and alarmed, I quite thought you were going to the rescue! I wonder what time it is?”
“We can soon tell that,” said Jim Airth, cheerfully. He dived into his pocket, produced a matchbox which he had long been fingering turn about with his pipe and tobacco-pouch, struck a light, and looked at his watch. Myra saw the lean brown face, in the weird flare of the match. She also saw the horrid depth so close to them, which she had almost forgotten. A sense of dizziness came over her. She longed to cling to his arm; but he had drawn it resolutely away.
“Half past ten,” said Jim Airth. “Miss Murgatroyd has donned her night-cap. Miss Eliza has sighed: ‘Good-night, summer, good-night, good-night,’ at her open lattice; and Susie, folding her plump hands, has said: ‘Now I lay me.’”
Myra laughed. “And they will all be listening for you to dump out your big boots,” she said. “That is always your ‘Good-night’ to the otherwise silent house.”
“No, really? Does it make a noise?” said Jim Airth, ruefully. “Never again——?”
“Oh, but you must,” said Myra. “I love—I mean Susie loves the sound, and listens for it. Jim, that match reminds me:—why don’t you smoke? Surely it would help the hunger, and be comfortable and cheering.”
Jim Airth’s pipe and pouch were out in a twinkling.
“Sure you don’t mind? It doesn’t make you sick, or give you a headache?”
“No, I think I like it,” said Myra. “In fact, I am sure I like it. That is, I like to sit beside it. No, I don’t do it myself.”