On Tristram's return, he had feigned sleep instinctively. Now the big, powerful figure huddled by the table fascinated him. He watched through half-opened eyes, painfully aware that he was eavesdropping, spying, but unable to turn away. Something was to be shown, made clear to him. He saw Tristram pick up a photograph which had stood hidden in the shadow and hold it before him. He remained thus motionless for many minutes. Meredith tried to speak to him, to hinder at all costs the self-betrayal which was to come. But it was too late. Without a sound, Tristram had dropped forward, hiding the portrait with his body, his face in his arms.
Thereafter Meredith lay still, with closed eyes, sick with an unformed sense of disaster.
By daybreak Tristram had disappeared. He left a brief note. He had been called to the next village—a case of fever. He hoped that the eggs would be all right for Meredith's breakfast. All very matter-of-fact and natural.
But the portrait on the table had vanished with him.
CHAPTER XVII
MRS. SMITHERS DOES ACCOUNTS
As she would have been the first to admit, arithmetic was not one of Mrs. Smithers's intellectual strongholds. Figures baulked her. They were an inexhaustible enemy which, when aroused, flung themselves upon her in serried legions and battalions, eluded pursuit, barricaded themselves behind mysterious lines, multiplied themselves into preposterous quantities, and utterly refused to "come out" and surrender to Mrs. Smithers's somewhat individual laws of subtraction and addition.
On this particular afternoon, she had determined on a grand assault, and had armed herself with a large sheet of paper, a pencil sharpened to a nicety, removed her mittens, straightened her wig, and figuratively rolled up her sleeves. Having made these preparations, which were probably intended more as a demonstration of impending "frightfulness" than as an actual assistance in her task, she took up her position in the dâk-bungalow dining-room and opened fire.
She had fought unflinchingly for an hour, when the curtains at the far end of the room were pushed aside with an impatience which Mrs. Smithers seemed to recognize. Before she even looked up, she turned the sheet of paper, with its pattern of astonishing hieroglyphics on its face, and set her mittens upon it with an air of fixing a tombstone over the body of her enemy.
"Why, lawks a-mercy, Sigrid, I thought you were sleeping!" she exclaimed.