He nodded.
“Got any money?”
“In a bank.”
“All right. You’ll want clothes and things. You can write. Only I want to know; it’s nothing I shouldn’t like? Is it?”
“No.”
“I don’t want you to tell me, but I wouldn’t like to think you’d done something you’d be sorry for. . . . You haven’t drunk your tea. I say, you haven’t drunk your tea. Asleep. I’m off. Good night.”
And she limped away into the inner room.
When he awoke the next day he remembered that she had come to him in the morning, shaken him out of his deep sleep, and made him understand that he could have her bed, sent him staggering toward it, and then, as he sank back into unconsciousness, he remembered hearing the door slam.
She had laid breakfast for him, tea, bread and butter, and an egg lying ready to be boiled in a saucepan. He was at first petulant at her absence, but shook himself up enough to see that he was not in a position to feel any such thing, and to be amazed at his own acquiescence in the unexpected. It was somehow disreputable, this discovery of himself in a strange room after two nights spent in his clothes. He had not even removed his boots. His gratitude to Ann Pidduck was appreciably lessened as he remembered that she had not thought to take them off for him. To put a man in her bed with his boots on! That was, to say the least of it, distasteful. It was sufficiently against the grain of his physical and mental habits to send his thoughts flying back to the life he had left, but they were caught in the mists of the excitement and pain through which he had passed, and he relapsed into an insensate pondering, forgot his breakfast, his surroundings, and sat unheeding through the day, until Ann returned in the evening. She brought flowers.
“Well, of all the——” she cried. “I did think you’d have cleared away. Why, you haven’t touched your breakfast. Haven’t you been out?”