“Oh, come, cheer up, old Toto; you’ll be able to watch her as much as you want. I suppose you will dine with the Leicesters the three times a week that you don’t dine with us, and have tea with Pauline every day, won’t you?”
“But they’re going out of England for a month,” Grimshaw said, “and I’m due to start for Athens the day before they come back.”
“Oh, poor boy!” Ellida commiserated him. “You won’t be able to watch your bird in Leicester’s cage for a whole ten weeks. I believe you’d like to cry over her.”
“I should like to cry over her,” Robert Grimshaw said, with perfect gravity. “I should like to kneel down and put my face in her lap and cry, and cry, and cry.”
“As you used to do with me years ago,” she said.
“As I used to do with you,” he answered.
“Poor—old—Tot,” she said very slowly, and he kissed her on her veil over her cheek, whilst he handed her into her coupé. She waved her black-gloved fingers at him out of the passing window, and, his hands behind his back, his shoulders square and his face serious, tranquil, and expressing no emotion, he slowly continued his stroll towards the Albert Memorial. He paused, indeed, to watch four sparrows hopping delicately on their mysterious errands, their heads erect, through the grimy and long grass between the Park railings and the path. It appeared to him that they were going ironically through a set of lancers, and the smallest of them, a paler coloured hen, might have been Pauline Leicester.
II
THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert Grimshaw and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep just before her time to pour out tea.
“What is the matter?” she asked; “you know you aren’t looking well, Toto.”