"I am at your service," rejoined Mr. Armstrong. "But to-morrow!"
"Don't you think, Ralph," said his wife, "you could read better if you followed your usual custom of dining early?"
"I am sure I should, Lizzie. Don't you think, Colonel Cathcart, it would be better to come in the evening, just after your dinner? I like to dine early, and I am a great tea-drinker. If we might have a huge tea-kettle on the fire, and tea-pot to correspond on the table, and I, as I read my story, and the rest of the company, as they listen, might help ourselves, I think it would be very jolly, and very homely."
To this the colonel readily agreed. I heard the ladies whispering a little, and the words—"Very considerate indeed!" from Mrs. Bloomfield, reached my ears. Indeed I had thought that the colonel's hospitality was making him forget his servants. And I could not help laughing to think what Beeves's face would have been like, if he had heard us all invited to dinner again, the next day.
Whether Adela suspected us now, I do not know. She said nothing to show it.
Just before the doctor left, with his brother and sister, he went up to her, and said, in a by-the-bye sort of way:
"I am sorry to hear that you have not been quite well of late, Miss Cathcart. You have been catching cold, I am afraid. Let me feel your pulse."
She gave him her wrist directly, saying:
"I feel much better to-night, thank you."
He stood—listening to the pulse, you would have said—his whole attitude was so entirely that of one listening, with his eyes doing nothing at all. He stood thus for a while, without consulting his watch, looking as if the pulse had brought him into immediate communication with the troubled heart itself, and he could feel every flutter and effort which it made. Then he took out his watch and counted.