Mrs. Pendyce stopped; a flush suffused her cheeks; she had pinched herself violently beneath the bedclothes.
“George,” said Mr. Pendyce, pursuing his own thoughts, “has no gumption. He'd never manage a man like Peacock—and you encourage him! He ought to marry and settle down.”
Mrs. Pendyce, the flush dying in her cheeks, said:
“George is very like poor Hubert.”
Horace Pendyce drew his watch from beneath his pillow.
“Ah!” But he refrained from adding, “Your people!” for Hubert Totteridge had not been dead a year. “Ten minutes to eight! You keep me talking here; it's time I was in my bath.”
Clad in pyjamas with a very wide blue stripe, grey-eyed, grey-moustached, slim and erect, he paused at the door.
“The girls haven't a scrap of imagination. What do you think Bee said? 'I hope he hasn't lost his train.' Lost his train! Good God! and I might have— I might have——” The Squire did not finish his sentence; no words but what seemed to him violent and extreme would have fulfilled his conception of the danger he had escaped, and it was against his nature and his training to exaggerate a physical risk.
At breakfast he was more cordial than usual to Gregory, who was going up by the first train, for as a rule Mr. Pendyce rather distrusted him, as one would a wife's cousin, especially if he had a sense of humour.
“A very good fellow,” he was wont to say of him, “but an out-and-out Radical.” It was the only label he could find for Gregory's peculiarities.