George smiled.
“No,” he said; “I had something else to see to!”
At sight of that smile Margery Pendyce's heart beat till she felt sick, but she, too, smiled.
“What a nice place you have here, darling!”
“There's room to walk about.”
Mrs. Pendyce remembered the sound she had heard of pacing to and fro. From his not asking her how she had found out where he lived she knew that he must have guessed where she had been, that there was nothing for either of them to tell the other. And though this was a relief, it added to her terror—the terror of that which is desperate. All sorts of images passed through her mind. She saw George back in her bedroom after his first run with the hounds, his chubby cheek scratched from forehead to jaw, and the bloodstained pad of a cub fox in his little gloved hand. She saw him sauntering into her room the last day of the 1880 match at Lord's, with a battered top-hat, a blackened eye, and a cane with a light-blue tassel. She saw him deadly pale with tightened lips that afternoon after he had escaped from her, half cured of laryngitis, and stolen out shooting by himself, and she remembered his words: “Well, Mother, I couldn't stand it any longer; it was too beastly slow!”
Suppose he could not stand it now! Suppose he should do something rash! She took out her handkerchief.
“It's very hot in here, dear; your forehead is quite wet!”
She saw his eyes turn on her suspiciously, and all her woman's wit stole into her own eyes, so that they did not flicker, but looked at him with matter-of-fact concern.
“That skylight is what does it,” he said. “The sun gets full on there.”