“I know just how it will be,” he complained mournfully, “the moment Aymer is here you will hound me off to work and I shall see nothing of you at all. You won’t even give me new pens. Charlotte, I should look horrid if I had no hair: be merciful.” 48
Renata smiled and shook her head. “I shall get no more work out of you this side of Christmas, sir. I have no such impossible dreams. Perhaps Aymer won’t want either of us now he has got Christopher.”
“I wonder now,” remarked Nevil, depositing Miss Charlotte on a seat while he took out his cigarette case, “I wonder if you are jealous, Renata.”
She flushed indignantly and denied the fact with most unnecessary emphasis, so her husband told her in his gentle teasing way. He turned her face up to his and professed to look stern, which he never could do.
“Confess now,” he insisted. “Just a little jealous of Christopher?”
“Well,” she admitted, laughing and still pink, “Aymer has never stayed away from us for so long before. I don’t know what was the use of his having those rooms done up for himself if he never means to use them.”
Renata continued to pick violets, and Max to decapitate those he could find. The dachshund and kitten continued to watch with absorbing interest, and Nevil continued to smoke and to let Charlotte investigate his cigarette case till her mother turned round and saw her.
“You dreadful child!” she cried, “Nevil, just look. Charlotte is sucking the ends of your horrid cigarettes! How can you let her?”
Charlotte was rescued from the cigarettes, or the cigarettes from Charlotte, with considerable difficulty and at the cost of many tears. Indeed her protestations were so loud that nurse appeared and bore her and Max away and silence again reigned in the warm garden between the sunny borders.
The dachshund gave a sigh and flopped down on the path, and the kitten began a toilet for want of better employment. Renata, who had stood aside during the 49 small domestic storm, gazed at her violets gravely as if she were counting them.