“What always astonishes me about young people is the way they think they're not seen—poor dears!”
Still there was silence.
“John! Are you thinking?”
For a considerable sound of breathing, not mere whiffling now, was coming from the Colonel—to his wife a sure sign.
And indeed he WAS thinking. Dolly was an imaginative woman, but something told him that in this case she might not be riding past the hounds.
Mrs. Ercott raised herself. He looked more good than ever; a little perplexed frown had climbed up with his eyebrows and got caught in the wrinkles across his forehead.
“I'm very fond of Olive,” he said.
Mrs. Ercott fell back on her pillows. In her heart there was just that little soreness natural to a woman over fifty, whose husband has a niece.
“No doubt,” she murmured.
Something vague moved deep down in the Colonel; he stretched out his hand. In that strip of gloom between the beds it encountered another hand, which squeezed it rather hard.