“You really must go to-morrow, Dick?”
“I must—to avoid war. I can’t be decently civil to your aunt for twenty-four hours longer. You can. That’s the wonder.”
“Worries have shrunk into pin-pricks, I think,” she said simply. “But I am sorry for the servants, who will all leave the place, and who have been here, some of them, as long as I have. Their hope is to return to me some time, but when the dragging up is going on, one feels as though one could never take root again. However, I didn’t come to say all this. I came to thank you, and I can’t.”
“I should be ashamed of you if you could. Look here, Ella, I suppose this plan of yours about going with Mrs Newbold is the best just at present?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“Hum,” said Wareham ruefully. “She’s a kind old soul, but body and mind made up of cotton wool. The finest quality of cotton wool, that I allow, still—”
Ella smiled.
“There’s a time when cotton wool is just what one wants.”
“I’ve never met with it, then.”
She did not go on to tell him that he might. What she said was spoken with hesitation.