How handsome he had been! She remembered the day—it was in winter too—when she had crept downstairs in the old house in Russell Street, and joined him in a musty, smelling, old "growler," that took them to the train for High Wycombe, where they had been married before lunch. Poor Ferdie! He had failed her utterly; she had suffered, and suffered silently; but as she looked at him there as he slept, her eyes filled with tears. He looked very lonely, very pathetic somehow, and helpless. The thin place shone out from his tumbled hair, and for a moment she was gripped by the helpless pathos of the briefness of life, of the inexorable march gravewards of every human being. Poor Ferdie, she thought again, as she went sadly back to bed.
She had no doubt failed him, too, and now they were both old.
[CHAPTER XVI]
As Mrs. Walbridge went down to breakfast the next morning, she was conscious of a hope that Paul would not be too pleased about his sister's engagement. She had not stopped to analyse her feeling, but it was not an unkind one. For Paul to be greatly pleased, would, she knew, mean that the worst side of his nature was touched by the event. So it was with some relief that she found the young man and his sister in the dining-room quarrelling.
"It's disgraceful," he declared, as she opened the door. "He's nearly old enough to be your grandfather."
Mrs. Walbridge's heart gave a thump of pleasure at this speech, not that she dreamed of his words having any influence on Grisel, but because honest indignation over an abstract right or wrong was very rarely roused in her son.
"Paul, Paul," she said gently, as she rang the bell and sat down behind the old-fashioned, acorn-topped, silver-plated tea equipage. "Good-morning, children."
Grisel kissed her and sat down at her place near the door, the chair with its back to the fire had always been Paul's.