"Hasn't it?" he urged.
"Well—" She was staring at her hands, blanched, wrinkled at the finger tips, by their long soaking. "If home is the bathroom!" Under her lowered eyelids she saw Charles watching her, guardedly. He set down his pipe with a click.
"If you feel that way!"
"Horrid of me to say it, wasn't it?" Catherine relaxed, her hands limp-wristed along the chair.
"I suppose you are tired. Awful strain, these last weeks."
"Perhaps I am." Catherine twisted sidewise in her chair and smiled at him. "But you look tired, too, poor boy. What have you been doing? I—why, I haven't seen you since I came back."
"You certainly haven't. But I didn't mind. Spencer—well, thank God, that's over!"
"Yes." Catherine discovered that she was so recently out from the distorting shadow of fear for Spencer that as yet she could not talk about it, as if words might have black magic to recall the fear.
"Damned lucky escape." Charles rammed tobacco into the pipe bowl with his thumb. He was thrusting out words in bravado, without looking at Catherine. He, too, had lived in that fear! He sucked vigorously, drawing the match flame down into the pipe. "What are you going to do now?"
The muscles of wrists and fingers leaped into tight contraction, and her hands doubled into fists against the chair.