But now she had got to act. She had woke early that morning and had found that he was already gone. That alone was quite enough to stir all her suspicions.
Perhaps now he was down there in the town with some one! Why should he get up at an unearthly hour unless it were for something of the kind? He had always been a very sound sleeper. At Epsom he would never have thought of getting up before eight. Who was it?
She put aside, for a moment, her own feelings about him, the curious way in which she was beginning to look at him. The different side that he was presenting to her and the way that she looked at it must wait until she had discovered this woman, this woman! She clenched her little hands and her eyes flashed.
Oh! she would talk to her when she found her!
His early escape that morning seemed to her a sign that the “woman” was down in the town. She imagined an obvious assignation, but otherwise she might have suspected that it was Mrs. Lester. That, of course, she had suspected from the day of the picnic, but it seemed to her difficult to imagine that a woman of the world, as Mrs. Lester, to give her her due, most obviously was, could see anything in her hulk of a James; it would be much more probable if it were some uncouth fisherwoman who knew, poor thing, no better.
She looked at him now across the breakfast-table; his red cheeks, his great nostrils “like a horse’s,” his enormous hands, but it was not all hostility the look that she gave him. There was a kind of dawning wonder and surprise.
They had their table by the window, and the sun beat through on to the silver teapot and the ham and eggs. Annie had refused porridge. No, she wasn’t hungry.
“You should have bathed, as I did, before breakfast,” said Maradick.
So he’d bathed before breakfast, had he? She looked across at him smiling.
“You were up very early,” she said.