He saw at once that Duncombe had told his sister the news. Henry had been prepared to show a great tenderness, a fine nobility, a touching fatherliness to the poor frightened lady. But Lady Bell-Hall was not frightened, she was merely querulous, with a drop of moisture at the end of her nose and a cross look down the table at Henry as though he were to-night just more than she could bear. It was also hard that on this night of all nights there should be that minced beef that Henry always found it difficult to encounter. It was not so much that the mince was cooked badly, and what was worse, meanly and baldly, but that it stood as a kind of symbol for all that was mistaken in Lady Bell-Hall's housekeeping.
She was a bad housekeeper, and thoroughly complacent over her incompetence, and it was this incompetence that irritated Henry. Somehow to-night there should have been a gracious offering of the very best the place could afford, with some silence, some resignation, some gentle evidence of affection. But it was not so. Duncombe was his old cynical self, with no sign whatever of the afternoon's mood.
Only for a moment after dinner in the little grey drawing-room, when Duncombe had left them alone and Henry was seated reading Couperas and Lady Bell-Hall opposite to him was knitting her interminable stockings, was there a flash of something. She looked up suddenly and across at him.
"I learn from my brother that he has told you?" she said, blinking her eyes that were always watering at him.
"Yes," said Henry.
"He tells me that it is nothing serious," her voice quavered.
"No, no," Henry half started up, his book dropping on to the floor. "Indeed, Lady Bell-Hall, it isn't. He hopes it will be all right in a week or two."
"Yes, yes," she answered, rather testily, as though she resented his fancying that he knew more about her brother's case than she herself did. "But operations are always dangerous."
"I had an operation once——" began Henry, then seeing that her eyes were busy with her knitting again he stopped. Nevertheless her little pink cheeks were shaking and her little obstinate chin trembled. He could see that she was doing all that she could to keep herself from tears. He could fancy herself saying: "Well, I'm not going to let that tiresome young man see me cry." But touched as he was impetuously whenever he saw any one in distress, he began again—"Why, when I had an operation once——"
"Thank you," she said to her knitting, "I don't think we'll talk about it if you don't mind."