“You are right to be angry with me,” Robina replied meekly; “there is no excuse for me. The whole thing is the result of my own folly.”
Her pathetic humility should have appealed to him. He can be sympathetic, when he isn’t hungry. Just then he happened to be hungry.
“I left you making a pie,” he said. “It looked to me a fair-sized pie. There was a duck on the table, with a cauliflower and potatoes; Veronica was up to her elbows in peas. It made me hungry merely passing through the kitchen. I wouldn’t have anything to eat in the town for fear of spoiling my appetite. Where is it all? You don’t mean to say that you and Veronica have eaten the whole blessed lot!”
There is one thing—she admits it herself—that exhausts Veronica’s patience: it is unjust suspicion.
“Do I look as if I’d eaten anything for hours and hours?” Veronica demanded. “You can feel my waistband if you don’t believe me.”
“You said just now you had had your lunch,” Dick argued.
“I know I did,” Veronica admitted. “One minute you are told that it is wicked to tell lies; the next—”
“Veronica!” Robina interrupted threateningly.
“It’s easy for you,” retorted Veronica. “You are not a growing child. You don’t feel it.”
“The least you can do,” said Robina, “is to keep silence.”