“Explain what, Pryde?” Latham asked in his Harley Street voice. To the insinuation of that deft tone many a patient had yielded a secret unconsciously.
But Stephen recalled himself, and was on his guard again. “Why—why—this sudden death.” A slight smile just flicked the physician’s serene face. Pryde rose once more and stood again gazing, half hypnotized by his own suggestion. “It was a great blow to me, Latham, a great blow”—a sigh, so sharp that it seemed to shake him, ended his sentence. “I torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Latham made no reply. Presently Pryde spoke again, repeating his own words rather wildly. “Torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Still Latham said nothing. He was considering.
CHAPTER XXV
In a little room high up in the house, her very own sitting-room, heaped with roses and heliotrope and carnations, its windows looking out to the Surrey hills and a gurgling brook—blue as steel in the winter cold, its snow-white banks edged with irregular shrubberies icicle-hung, Helen and Latham sat in close conference.
A glorious fire flamed on the broad hearth in the corner. Helen had inherited her father’s love of fires. When the war came, crippling their servant staff both at Curzon Street and at Deep Dale, and making the replenishing of coal cellars arduous, and posters on every hoarding admonished patriotism to economize fuel, Richard Bransby had installed a gas-fire in his library. Helen had opposed this, she had so loved the great mixed fire of logs and of coal before which so many of her childhood’s gloamings had been spent, so many of her acute young dreams dreamed, but for once the father had not yielded to her. In one particular the gas-fire had appealed to him—it minimized the intrusions of servants when he best liked to have his “den” to himself. Humbly born, but with none of the excrescent caddishness of smaller-souled nouveaux riches, he had no liking for the visible presence of his domestic retinue, and when servants were ill-trained and imperfectly unobtrusive, little irritated him more than to have them about, and, except by Helen, he was a man easily irritated. So gas had replaced wood and anthracite in his room. But not so in Helen’s. She meant well by her country, but the logs piled high on her hearth. The patriotisms of youth are apt to be thoughtless, in every country. Often Youth makes the great sacrifice—England needs no telling of that—but Age makes the ten thousand daily burnt-offerings that in their infinite aggregate heap high in the scale of a people’s devotion; and, perhaps, win as tender approval from the Angel that records.
The morning sun streamed in riotously. A room could not be prettier or more cozy. It made a brilliant background to the slender, black-clad girl-figure, and the handsome, middle-aged man, dressed as carefully as she—in a gray morning suit—and almost as slender. Dr. Latham took every care of his figure.
“I hope you are not going to be angry with me,” Helen said, looking at him a little ruefully.
“My dear child!”