"Ah," she said, "and the stuff? Did they get the stuff off?"
I said I believed that it had got off safely.
"I believe everybody's bewitched to-day," she said, bursting into tears. "Oh, Dick, come back to me. Come back to me. Oh, why did I ever marry a man like you?"
She cried bitterly for a few minutes. Then she asked me a lot of questions about the fight. One question she repeated many times: "Was there a grey horse in the second string?"
But this I could not answer certainly. All the time that we were talking, she was crying and laughing by turns. Whenever a person entered (even if it were only the milkman) she turned white and shook, as though expecting the police.
"It's the palpitation," she would explain. "That and the sizzums."
Then she would go on laughing and crying by turns until some one else came in.
Presently the landlady looked at me rather hard. "Here," she said, "you are not one of them. You've run away from home, you have. What are you doing here?"
I said that I was on my way to London.
"To London," she said. "What's a boy like you going to London for? How are you going?"