“Yes,” she confessed, “I have, but you’re not going to talk about it until you have had supper. Don’t move until I make the coffee.”
She was genuinely hungry, but while she satisfied her own appetite she took care that her companion, who did not seem inclined to eat, made a simple meal. Then she put the plates into a cupboard and sat down facing Agatha.
“Well,” she said, “you have broken down exactly as that throat specialist said you would. The first question is, how long it will be before you can go on again?”
Agatha laughed, a little harsh laugh. “I didn’t tell you everything at the time: I’ve broken down for good,” she answered.
There was a moment of tense silence, and then Agatha made a dejected gesture. “The specialist warned me that this might happen if I went on singing, but what could I do? I couldn’t cancel my engagements without telling people why. The physician said I must go to Norway and give my throat and chest a rest.”
They looked at each other, and there was in their eyes the half-bitter, half-weary smile of those to whom the cure prescribed is ludicrously impossible. It was Winifred who spoke first.
“Then,” she commented, “we have to face the situation, and it’s not an encouraging one. Our joint earnings just keep us here in decency—we won’t say comfort—and they’re evidently to be subject to a big reduction. It strikes me as a rather curious coincidence that a letter from that man in Canada and one from your prosperous friends in the country arrived just before you went out.”
She saw the look in Agatha’s eyes, and spread her hands out.
“Yes,” she admitted; “I hid them. It seemed to me that you had quite enough upon your mind this evening. I don’t know whether the letters are likely to throw any fresh light upon the question what we’re going to do.”
She produced the letters from a drawer in her table, and Agatha straightened herself suddenly in her chair when she had opened the first of them.