“I don’t feel well, dearest.”
“Well, sit by me, and I will take your head in my lap and nurse you.”
She led him gently back to the sofa. But presently, when she had curled herself up in a corner of it, and making him lie full length had pillowed his head upon her breast, and administered kisses and eau de Cologne alternately with great lavishness, she peered into his face with a new inspiration, and said mysteriously:
“You are not ill—you are unhappy.”
He protested he was only grieving at the change in their fortunes for her sake.
Nouna laughed gently. “I was silly,” she said, “and wicked. In the first moments of surprise one does not know what one says. I don’t mind at all. I would rather be poor in Paris than rich in London.”
He shivered, though Nouna, with some tact, believing he was jealous, had not mentioned her mother again. But she examined his face attentively, and saw that the drawn, hopeless look remained. After a few moments she slipped her shoulder away very tenderly from beneath his head, which she transferred to a cushion; and George heard the door softly shut after her as she went out. He called to her, but she took no notice, and he supposed she had gone to dress. But in a few minutes the ghost-like figure glided in again, looking just the same, and came to where he was now sitting upright on the sofa.
“There!” she said triumphantly, and she put her jewellery, piece by piece, down to a little gold bar brooch which he had given her before their marriage, into her husband’s pockets. “You can go and sell them this minute if you like. You see I don’t mind a bit. Not—a—bit,” she repeated deliberately, and then looked into his face to see whether this willing act of self-sacrifice had brought him consolation.
George smiled at her and told her she was a good child; but his smile was still very sad, and the hand which he placed on her shoulder trembled. Then Nouna, who was sitting on the rug at his feet, began to cry quietly; their usual mutual position was reversed; it was she who now wanted to get nearer to him, and did not know how. A strange deadness seemed to have come over him, so that he did not notice even her tears. He was indeed arranging his plans for their departure from England, with some distrust of his wife’s fortitude at the end. At last, when amazement at this singular state of affairs had dried her eyes, and she had sat mournfully staring at her husband in utter silence for some minutes, a light broke upon her face, and she sprang up suddenly into a kneeling position. Joining her hands together above his knees like a child and looking out instinctively at the glimpse of darkening sky visible between the leaves of the plants in her little window conservatory, she said with all the solemnity and timidity of a person who is undertaking for the first time an arduous responsibility:
“Pray God to comfort my husband George, if I cannot.”