It is five o'clock. In an hour's time Dimbie will be here.
The day has passed desperately slowly, and yet all too quickly, for I am not ready for him yet. My smile is still trembly. I feel my lips quiver as I practise it. Amelia looks at me out of the corner of her eye. How can she know what I am doing—that I am engaged in smiling exercises? A new feature of my curious mental condition, she thinks. But Amelia is very gentle and patient with me now. She does not want me to know that there is any difference in her method of treating me. She is still firm and managing, but an unwonted softness creeps into her voice and manner when she addresses me. She has not referred to my trouble, and I understand why. She is cheating herself into believing that the doctors have made a mistake, and she thinks she is cheating me into the same belief. In an off-hand way she will refer to Mr. Tompkins having been told by a famous specialist that he was suffering from "hangina pectorate," and how it was nothing of the kind, but simply indigestion through eating Welsh rabbit six nights out of seven; and how the second Miss Tompkins was told unless she had an operation she would be dead in a week, and how she ran away from the nursing home to which she had been taken and so saved her life, as she never had it done.
Amelia's recitations help to pass the time. Just now I pretended I wanted tea, hoping to decoy her into staying with me a while when she came to remove the tray, but she said she was busy.
"Busy!" I ejaculated, "on a sultry afternoon like this. What can you be doing?"
And she asked me if I imagined the work got done itself. And if I thought an oven never wanted washing out with quicklime.
"What do you do that for?" I said eagerly.
From certain well-known signs I thought Amelia was preparing for a gossip, but I was disappointed, for she picked up the tray and moved towards the house.
"Why do you quicklime the oven?" I called after her desperately. I could not face another long half-hour alone.
She put the tray down on to the step and walked slowly back.
"Do you really want to know, mum?"