And slowly she came nigh him;
And all she said when there she came,
'Young man, I think you're dying.'"
The words, which she had sung to herself many a time, taking pleasure in their grotesque simplicity, presented themselves now with such sudden and ghastly directness, that a cold damp broke out on her forehead. She set her teeth fast, fearing that Barbara's speech would force its way through her lips with an outburst of hysterical laughter. What could she say, what could anybody say, but, "Young man, I think you're dying?" The words were clamouring so loudly in her ears that she glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Harding to make sure that they had not been spoken.
Reynold's smile recalled her to herself, and told her that he was reading too much on her startled face. "Won't you sit down?" he said, pointing to a chair. Before she took it she instinctively put out her hand, and greeted him with a murmur of speech. What she said she did not exactly know, but not those hideous words, thank God!
Mrs. Harding paused for a moment by the fire, gazing curiously at her son, as if she were studying a problem. Then silently, in obedience to some sign of his, or to some divination of her own, she turned away and left the two together.
Barbara looked over her shoulder at the closing door, and her eyes in travelling back to Harding's face took in the general aspect of the room. It was fairly large and lofty. Folding doors, painted a dull drab, divided it from what she conjectured was the sick man's bed-room. It was dull, it was negative, not particularly shabby, not uncomfortable, not vulgar, but hopelessly dreary and commonplace. There was in it no single touch of beauty or individuality on which the eye could rest. Some years earlier an upholsterer had supplied the ordinary furniture, a paper-hanger had put up an ordinary paper, and, except that time had a little dulled and faded everything, it remained as they had left it. The drab was rather more drab, that was all.
"Well," said Reynold from his arm-chair, "so you have come to see me."
"I wanted to ask you how you were—I heard you were ill," Barbara explained, and it struck her that she was exactly like a little parrot, saying the same thing over and over again.
"Very kind of you," he replied. "Do you want me to answer?"