“Am I?” Pryde said skeptically.
Angela held out her ring-heavy hand. “Put it there, pard,” she commanded. And after a moment the sick man lifted his thin, bloodless hand and laid it in hers. “Perhaps I’m going to be good—though it hadn’t occurred to me till you mentioned it—but I can scarcely be required to be a boy. I was quite a year or two old at your birth.”
“Never mind, I’ve been a mother to you.”
“Heavens, yes; you have,” Stephen replied.
He lay in his own bed in Pont Street, and nothing was much changed in his room from what it had been for years; a temple and workshop of flight. Pictures of birds, of bats and of butterflies and of man-made aircraft covered the walls. The skeleton of a flying fox shared the glass case of a flying fish. A long workmanlike table stretched the length of the room—a table stacked with orderly piles of plans and designs, groups of models, trays of “parts” and of tools. Every book in the room (and they were many) treated of the air and air navigation. “Not a novel in the whole show,” Angela had told her husband disgustedly. And on Stephen’s desk lay a half-finished manuscript positively bristling with small detail drawings of rotary and fixed engines, sketches of exhaust manifolds and working diagrams of many-bladed propellers, his pen beside it, as he had left it on the last day he had journeyed to Oxshott.
The woman bustled about the room and the man lay and watched her, a gentler look in his eyes than those poor anxious organs had shown for years.
“That’s a wonderful frock,” he said lazily.
“Great Scott, and I with no apron on! Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said excitedly, and dashed to the chest of drawers, opened one drawer, and shook out a voluminous apron, all-covering as a hospital apron, but more decorative.
“It’s a shame to cover it,” Stephen objected.
“It’s my going-away dress, the very first dress Angela M. Latham ever was hooked and laced into, and you needn’t think I’m going to spill ox tail soup, Top Bronnen water, peaches and wine over it. The chinchilla it’s trimmed with cost eighty guineas, and every inch of the lace cost half a crown—hand crocheted.” She relentlessly tied the frilled and ribboned strings of the apron about her slim waist. “If you like this, I wonder what you’d have said to my wedding dress. I’m going to be painted in it—by one of the very biggest big-bugs. I want Poynter, because he’s the president of the brush and paint boys, and the president seemed about the right thing to draw an American’s picture, but Horace says Poynter doesn’t do portraits. My wedding dress was—well, really it was—and I designed it two minutes after we were engaged. Quick work. It was velvet, just not white, the faintest, loveliest tinge of green you ever saw; there was white fox at the hem, not too much, that’s half the art of dressing—narrow really in front, but it widened out as it went around till it measured over two feet at the very back. And my bonnet, not much bigger than a big butterfly, nothing but pearls and one ear of point lace, lined with green—emerald green to show it up—You’re not listening.”