“What have you been doing during the past week or so?” she persisted as she glanced round the room. “What a wretched place you have got! The windows are small, and the curtains dirty. Where are your other rooms?”
He hastened to show her them, in the hope that he might divert her mind from the question of his late doings; but she only repeated the question.
“I have been reading,” he replied, “and writing, and thinking of you.”
“Have you yet read my books?” she inquired. “Where are they? I will take them back with me.”
One of them happened to be lying on the table. She looked at the page at which it was open, and saw that the page was covered with dust.
“You have not read them!” she exclaimed.
“No,” he confessed.
Once more she looked at the mess and disorder in the room, and then inquired: “Then what have you been doing? You have neither been writing nor reading.”
“No; I have not had time to do so.. In this place, as soon as one rises, the rooms need to be swept, and other interruptions occur afterwards. Next, when dinner is over——”
“When dinner is over you need to go to sleep.”